Kansas City Confidential (1952)

Phil Karlson, John Payne, Coleen Gray, Lee Van Cleef · 1952 · 99 min

An armored car robbery run by masked men who never see each other's faces, and an innocent ex-con framed for it who goes looking for them one at a time. The mask arrangement was borrowed wholesale by Reservoir Dogs and Tarantino has never pretended otherwise. Phil Karlson directs with a brutality unusual for 1952 — the interrogation is genuinely ugly — and Lee Van Cleef and Jack Elam are precisely where they belong.

Chosen print (2026-08-22): Archive.org item kansascityconfidencial — 2.44 GB MPEG-2 · 768×576 · 99.0 min ✓.

Culled: 720p MKV (provenance), 1080p Blu-ray rip, colorized derivative, _ipod re-encode.

Selected from our vetted candidate queue after the automated reject rules and a curation pass. The downloaded file was verified byte-for-byte against Archive.org's published size and MD5, and the torrent was generated from that exact file.

Watched end to end and confirmed on 2026-08-22 (owner eye-pass): runtime, intact titles, no watermarks or overlays, no colorization or crop, audio in sync.

Print upgraded (2026-08-22). Replaced kansascityconfidencial (768x576 @ 3.3 Mbps) with Archive.org item KansasCityConfidential720p — 954x720 @ 6.3 Mbps, 4.69 GB, 99.3 min.

Found by the 2026-08-22 catalogue-wide print sweep, after the rule change that allows restoration transfers. Candidates were scored on resolution and bits per pixel, then compared frame-by-frame against the incumbent before this one was taken. Broadcast captures, AI upscales, colorised and frame-interpolated copies were rejected outright; where a candidate's frame was a different shape, cropdetect was used to tell a genuinely wider picture from a crop hiding in a wide container.

The superseded print stays in the catalogue as a superseded edition and keeps seeding — its torrent has its own info_hash and its own swarm, and anyone part-way through a download of it is unaffected.

Public domain by long-standing distribution consensus: published 1952, renewal required in the 28th year and by all accounts never filed. The renewal window (1979–80) falls in the Copyright Office's post-1977 online records rather than the scanned CCE volumes, so the online renewal search is the named remaining verification step before the torrent publishes.