Kansas Pacific isn't a particularly great film, but it's far from the bottom of the barrel if you ask me. The main thing it's got going for it is obvious leading man Sterling Hayden, slumming it at Allied Artists but putting his best effort into a pretty standard character. And although the film's plot twists will be easily seen a mile away, the script manages to make the scenario come alive with some crisp dialogue and assorted moments of insight.
Hayden plays John Nelson, a U.S. Army Captain who is sent to Kansas as an undercover agent, posing as an engineer with the railroad company on the project to build a railroad connecting Kansas to the West Coast. As the prologue explains, the completion of the railroad is crucial to the North's hopes in the impending Civil War (the film is set in 1860, just before the outbreak of hostilities). The South, realizing this, sends an intelligent and cultured leader, Bill Quantrill (Reed Hadley) to co-ordinate attacks with an eye to delaying the railroad's completion. At first the railroad man on the job, Cal Bruce (Barton MacLane) and his lovely daughter Barbara (Eve Miller) resist his charms and his efforts, but they soon learn of his patriotic mission and embrace the cause.
This is an extremely low budget film so cheap that you can easily spot anachronisms like tire tread on the roads. In the scene where Captain Nelson chases the two men into the bar, he tries to tie his horse onto the post but the rope slips off and he just walks away. I guess they figured audiences wouldn't notice this stuff, or it was too late to fix. Anyway, the cheap sets do give the film a somewhat unpleasant look with the interior scenes I recognized the Washington DC set as the same one used in some of Roger Corman's films from later in the 50s, and possibly in some of the Schneer/Harryhausen productions but this is more than made up for by some lovely exterior photography of the Western setting.
As said above the plot is somewhat standard as is the approach to the romance between the Captain and the daughter, but everything is done just well enough so that Western fans won't mind. The film gives us a somewhat interesting look at the period just before the Civil War, where as the prologue reminds us there was massive bloodshed which was unjustified because there had been no formal declaration of war (does this imply that the declaration of war made mass bloodshed somehow just?). When Captain Nelson arrives in town almost the first thing he does is involve himself in a fight between strangers. It turns out that he had come to the rescue of his nemesis, Bill Quantrill, because the Southerner was being jumped by 3 men with Northern sympathies. This underlies the Captain's essential morality he is supporting the North but he would not do anything dishonorable to further his cause. At this point before the War at least, it's still possible to place morality or justice above victory. Given the fact that Hadley's Quantrill is well-spoken and seems more reserved than his henchmen (one of whom is portrayed by Clayton Moore), this initial scene between the two men promises the possibility of two opposing but equally honorable opponents, but the film doesn't really follow this interesting course, instead eventually devolving into a fairly standard good guys/bad guys conflict.
Still, for Western fans this one will be reasonably worthwhile for Hayden's stout performance and some decent action scenes the attack on the train by cannons is particularly and surprisingly effective given how cheap the film is on the whole.
Hayden plays John Nelson, a U.S. Army Captain who is sent to Kansas as an undercover agent, posing as an engineer with the railroad company on the project to build a railroad connecting Kansas to the West Coast. As the prologue explains, the completion of the railroad is crucial to the North's hopes in the impending Civil War (the film is set in 1860, just before the outbreak of hostilities). The South, realizing this, sends an intelligent and cultured leader, Bill Quantrill (Reed Hadley) to co-ordinate attacks with an eye to delaying the railroad's completion. At first the railroad man on the job, Cal Bruce (Barton MacLane) and his lovely daughter Barbara (Eve Miller) resist his charms and his efforts, but they soon learn of his patriotic mission and embrace the cause.
This is an extremely low budget film so cheap that you can easily spot anachronisms like tire tread on the roads. In the scene where Captain Nelson chases the two men into the bar, he tries to tie his horse onto the post but the rope slips off and he just walks away. I guess they figured audiences wouldn't notice this stuff, or it was too late to fix. Anyway, the cheap sets do give the film a somewhat unpleasant look with the interior scenes I recognized the Washington DC set as the same one used in some of Roger Corman's films from later in the 50s, and possibly in some of the Schneer/Harryhausen productions but this is more than made up for by some lovely exterior photography of the Western setting.
As said above the plot is somewhat standard as is the approach to the romance between the Captain and the daughter, but everything is done just well enough so that Western fans won't mind. The film gives us a somewhat interesting look at the period just before the Civil War, where as the prologue reminds us there was massive bloodshed which was unjustified because there had been no formal declaration of war (does this imply that the declaration of war made mass bloodshed somehow just?). When Captain Nelson arrives in town almost the first thing he does is involve himself in a fight between strangers. It turns out that he had come to the rescue of his nemesis, Bill Quantrill, because the Southerner was being jumped by 3 men with Northern sympathies. This underlies the Captain's essential morality he is supporting the North but he would not do anything dishonorable to further his cause. At this point before the War at least, it's still possible to place morality or justice above victory. Given the fact that Hadley's Quantrill is well-spoken and seems more reserved than his henchmen (one of whom is portrayed by Clayton Moore), this initial scene between the two men promises the possibility of two opposing but equally honorable opponents, but the film doesn't really follow this interesting course, instead eventually devolving into a fairly standard good guys/bad guys conflict.
Still, for Western fans this one will be reasonably worthwhile for Hayden's stout performance and some decent action scenes the attack on the train by cannons is particularly and surprisingly effective given how cheap the film is on the whole.