Prime Cut | Dir. Michael Ritchie | 1972

[ReviewAZON asin="B0008KLVA0" display="inlinepost"]Think of Lee Marvin and the first image that pops into your head might be of him hunting down his prey in Point Blank (John Boorman 1967), or leading a group of criminals on a suicide mission in The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich 1967) or maybe even scalding Gloria Grahame’s face with coffee in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953). Chances are it won’t be the big man getting chased across a wheat field by a redneck driving a huge red combine harvester. Unless that is you’ve seen Michael Ritchie’s bizarre thriller Prime Cut, starring Marvin as a Chicago mob enforcer out to collect an outstanding debt from small town racketeer Mary-Ann (Gene Hackman).

Ritchie won acclaim for his first movie Downhill Racer (1969) starring Robert Redford as an ambitious young skier. Gene Hackman also featured in a supporting role and Ritchie uses him again to great effect in Prime Cut as an eccentric cattle baron with lucrative sidelines peddling dope and prostitution. Mary Ann is supposed to be making payments to the mob but has been reneging on the agreement. Nick Devlin (Marvin) is approached by an old associate to get the money. Nick is initially reluctant, until he is introduced to a packet of sausages, the remains of the last man they sent to Kansas after Mary Ann.

As Nick and his accomplices leave Chicago they pass a cinema with the names of two films on the marquee. They are the western The Revengers (Daniel Mann) and the horror movie Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (John D. Hancock). Both of these films are about outsiders facing up to hostile adversaries in the countryside and Prime Cut has a similar theme. The city boys arrive in Kansas in their sharp suits and their chauffer driven car and find Mary-Ann has no intention of paying them.

Nick and Mary-Ann have clashed before. The name Clarabelle keeps being bandied about. It says a lot about Prime Cut and writer Robert Dillon’s warped sense of humour that it would not have surprised me one bit if Clarabelle had turned out to be a cow. She is thankfully a woman (Angel Thompson) though and married to Mary-Ann. Back in the day Clarabelle and Nick had a thing going, but now she lives a life of luxury on a yacht. Mary-Ann’s brother Weenie (Gregory Walcott) is dumber than his sibling, but just as dangerous.

Lee Marvin shows a charming side to his tough guy persona; he is unfailingly polite to the mother of one of his henchmen who insists he says hello to her. Nick might be a gangster, but he is more like an old-fashioned knight in shining armour, especially in his treatment of Poppy (Sissy Spacek) whom he rescues from a cattle-style auction on Mary-Ann’s farm. Oddly enough when Mary-Ann parades her in front of him, Nick hears her say “help me,” even though she never seems to open her mouth.

Ritchie orchestrates several great set-pieces including a turkey shoot at a country fair with the Chicago boys as the turkeys. There were plenty of other films around at the time hinting at the unease present in Vietnam-era America, but none of them did so quite like this. Prime Cut foregoes grittiness for black comedy and Gene Polito’s cinematography captures the beauty of the countryside in such a way that the violence seems even more absurd in such an idyllic setting.

Lalo Schifrin’s jazz score complements the action sequences, but in its quieter moments comforts the audience as if it were a mother telling her child everything is going to be okay. Prime Cut has a touch of the fairytale about it, especially in its denouement. This unusual approach may be responsible for the mixed reviews it received on its release and the film’s continuing neglect today.

Kevin Sturton