Kansas City Bomber (1972) on Netflix

PG19721h 39mDrama Sport

K.C. Carr leaves her Kansas City roller derby team and joins the Portland Loggers, raising two children on her own. The team's owner, Burt Henry, takes an interest in her.

Netflix2.8/5
IMDb5.5/101,753 votes
Rotten Tomatoes35%

Trailer

Plot summary

After leaving her roller derby team in Kansas City, Missouri, K.C. Carr starts her life over as a single mother in Portland, Oregon, skating for a team called the Portland Loggers. She is raising a son and a daughter, and she wants both a happy personal life and stardom on the track. The league is Roller Games, a theatrical branch of roller derby. Burt Henry, who owns the Loggers, is clearly interested in her, and the two of them begin dating. Jackie Burdette is K.C.'s teammate and her rival on the track, and Hank Hopkins is the team's star male skater.

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Kansas City Bomber (1972)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

Welch practiced skating for months, training with pro teams while wearing a wig and dark glasses and posing as a journalist working on a story, then broke her right wrist during a speed skating session, postponing shooting eight weeks until April.
Barry Sandler wrote the script as a UCLA MA thesis with Raquel Welch in mind for the lead: "I just thought it would be great to see her as a roller derby queen; it seemed like a perfect meshing of pop culture with that role."
Two weeks into the Portland, Oregon shoot, Welch suffered a cut lip and a swollen face during a fight scene with co-star Helena Kallianiotes. An MGM spokesman said the two actors "got carried away" and Welch "got slugged".
Folk singer Phil Ochs wrote a song called Kansas City Bomber as the film's title song, but Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer rejected it, so he had A&M Records issue it as a single anyway.
The film was heavily publicised during filming, which inspired Roger Corman to finance an exploitation picture of his own set in the world of roller derbies, Unholy Rollers.