John Payne was the perfectly imperfect star for Karlson's kind of noir: a former pretty-boy crooner whose face eroded into a sagging scowl, Payne conveyed a mixture of baffled resignation and simmering resentment in his portrayals of fate-battered characters. Kansas City Confidential pits Payne against Preston Foster, a criminal puppetmaster who jerks the strings of Neville Brand, Jack Elam, and Lee Van Cleef, the most grotesque trio of heavies this side of Dick Tracy. In a plot laden with paranoid convolutions, Foster's gang pulls off a sensational heist and Payne gets blamed; wronged but not innocent, the patsy turns persecutor, eventually tracing the robbers to a tropical resort where they await the big payoff. (Spying and stalking one another while attempting to pose as casual tourists, the men become caricatures of Americans-at-leisure.) Eerie imagery—jumpsuited men in blank gray masks, sweat-smeared faces in stark close-up—amplifies the atmosphere of suspicion, which is interrupted but not relieved by ironic humor and sudden eruptions of violence.
—Juliet Clark