"Bad Blood": The familiar border war tale, 21st-century style

You have heard the story about the Kansas-Missouri border wars before, but I guarantee you’ve never seen anything like “Bad Blood,” the Kansas City Public Television production that airs at 7 tonight on KCPT.

Following other films that depicted the battles of “Bleeding Kansas” — including Ang Lee’s “Ride With the Devil” and the Wichita-produced “Touched by Fire” — producers Angee Simmons and Pam Reichart decided they would try a different tack.

The result is an engaging 84-minute film that marries a fluid retelling of the seven-year political battle for the soul of Kansas Territory with first-rate action sequences from Kansas City’s own Wide Awake Films.

“Bad Blood” brings to life the origins of the two states’ feud, and also makes the case few historians a generation ago would have: that here, on this soil, the first blood of the American Civil War was shed.

Yes, there’s plenty of period gunplay and men in hopelessly bulky clothes running around in fields. But aside from a chapter in James McPherson’s award-winning Civil War book Battle Cry of Freedom, I can’t recall a more thorough or compelling account of the tug of war between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces in Kansas.

To its credit, the film downplays the role of John Brown and gives more voice to the ordinary people, the vast majority of settlers who came neither for slavery nor abolition but for cheap land and opportunity.

Reichart, a native of the area, and Simmons, who hails from Iowa, had been pining to do a film about the border wars ever since they visited Lecompton, the territorial capital of Kansas before the Civil War. They were captivated by the Lecompton Reenactors, the all-volunteer living history troupe that performs raucous 1850s-style town hall meetings around the state.

As it happens, I was there as the producers filmed scenes for what would become “KC to Kanorado,” KCPT’s travelogue of attractions along I-70. My wife, then writing a biography of the pioneer feminist Clarina Nichols, was performing with the re-enactors, and on that day I joined in the fun as the Rev. Thomas Johnson, fulminating about the disease of abolitionism, “which came from the East, just like the cholera!”

What impressed Simmons and Reichart about Lecompton, a slavery stronghold in its heyday, was how its residents had preserved a story of Bleeding Kansas that was more balanced and more complicated than the popular accounts handed down over the years.

With less than 48 hours before the “Bad Blood” premiere at the Liberty Memorial, Simmons took a break last week from an editing marathon at KCPT to talk about the film’s shaky first steps.

“We interviewed two historians — Nicole Etcheson (author of the recent history Bleeding Kansas) and Jonathan Earle (the KU prof who has written about the impact of abolitionism in pre-Civil War politics) — and both of them had many, many brilliant things to say,” Simmons said.

Yet as they replayed the interviews and pored through the growing pile of revisionist literature on the period, they realized they were not exactly doing original or perhaps very interesting work. “So we decided, why not tell it instead in a new way that’s hopefully more entertaining than the usual talking heads?” she said.

About that time the filmmakers learned about Wide Awake, a River Market video production company whose principals are working on their seventh in a series of DVD documentaries on Civil War battles. Their forte is military re-enactment, as you’ll see from the opening of “Bad Blood,” which includes a few seconds from one of Wide Awake’s films, an overhead shot of men charging through a battlefield toward a line of rifles firing madly.

Reichart and Simmons set aside the interviews (which will be extras on the forthcoming DVD) and partnered with Wide Awake Films. Over the next year the group filmed various scenes with more than 30 actors and 110 extras at Old Missouri Town, the Shawnee Indian Mission and Shoal Creek, among other places.

Just as effective as the battle re-enactments are the political re-enactments. Key moments in the struggle for free-state Kansas are convincingly dramatized in “Bad Blood.” Wide Awake’s Shane Seley is notable for his portrayal of free-state militia leader Jim Lane, who was certainly inspired and quite possibly insane.

But the producers’ most important decision was to turn the historical figures themselves into talking heads. Instead of latter-day scholars, the actors sit in the interview seat and look slightly off-camera as they complain of the “blackest of all evils, human slavery,” or the “scum and filth of the Northern cities” coming to pollute Kansas.

We hear from colorful personalities like future governor Charles Robinson and his flinty wife, Sara, or the rascally sheriff of Douglas County, Sam Jones. But we also hear from some unnamed characters, such as the settler’s wife who sighs and says, “We were just comin’ to Kansas for the land, not the cause.”

The music by Connie Dover is affecting, and the cinematography — the documentary is shot in high definition — at times is dazzling. The strongest aesthetic touches in “Bad Blood” are the title cards that open each segment of the film. Each one features a portrait taken by Robert Szabo, one of the country’s leading practitioners of 19th-century wet plate photography.  (I've included three here on this page.) Szabo’s process renders an authentic, sepia-toned look, yet no matter how sternly his period-dressed models glare into his lens, they can’t help but look like 21st-century men.

The effect is a bit of magic, not unlike hearing “Ashokan Farewell,” the heart-rending fiddle song Jay Ungar composed for Ken Burns’ “The Civil War.” Both are works of emotional genealogy by contemporary artists that bring the dry bones of our ancestors to life. Looking at Szabo’s subjects, you can’t help but think: That could be my brother or father or son going off to senseless slaughter in a faraway, lawless region. It’s a thought more Americans ought to have, especially those who work in the District of Columbia.