MIDWEST MANNERS: Michael Ritchie's PRIME CUT (dir by Michael Ritchie, w/ Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman, Sissy Spacek, 88mns, USA, 1972)
If American moviemaker Michael Ritchie was responsible for no more than the scene in 1976's THE BAD NEWS BEARS where a little league team discovers their grumpy coach played by Walter Matthau near passed out drunk on a pitcher's mound and wonder if there's going to be practice, Ritchie's place in movie history would be firm.
But Ritchie actually had a career as unpredictable as many of the misfits he made the center of his movies. Known for THE CANDIDATE, DOWNHILL RACER, BAD NEWS BEARS, FLETCH, among others, Ritchie also directed his share of movies that didn't work or are lost to the sands of time.
But there is something like a "Ritchie touch" in the best of his work-an affection for the misfit and a rough ease with atmosphere and milieu.
So it might be possible to say that Ritchie's nasty, fun, shocking bit of gangster pulp PRIME CUT is an underrated gem.
Hackman v Marvin. The 70’s equivalent of Batman v Superman.
Lee Marvin's Chicago fixer Nick is sent down to Kansas City to straighten out rogue crass brutish meat processor and rural gangster Mary Ann (Gene Hackman). Mary Ann owes the Chicago mob $500K but refuses to pay it. He holds Chicago in such disregard, he sends up packages of sausages that turn out to be the previous would be collectors.
You can see the problem.
When Nick gets to Kansas City though, he's disgusted by Mary Ann's disregard for all human life. Cows, women, Chicago gangsters, livestock, Mary Ann treats them all the same as exemplified in a near horrific scene where young orphan girls doped up on heroin and naked in cow stalls are up for sex worker auction with Mary Ann's friends.
One of these poor women, Poppy (Sissy Spacek), begs Nick to help her and Nick obliges-bringing Poppy back to his hotel room.
PRIME CUT works amazingly well for a movie that hits the beats it has to hit without ever offering anything transcendent.
What does stand out, from moment one, is Ritchie's facility with location and local color. And an almost perverse enjoyment of a throwaway detail that disturbs because of HOW underplayed it is.
Early on we see a naked corpse amongst the cattle lined up for slaughter. Later the orphan sex worker auction is shocking for how bluntly it is presented.
Before she was Carrie, Sissy Spacek was a surprisingly believable doped up midwest call girl. . .
Mind you-we're meant to be shocked. Even jaded Lee Marvin is shocked. And that's the point.
There's a dark comedic sensibility that courses through the movie. Kansas City is a rural midwest farm town at heart and Mary Ann and his gangster crew are proud country boys, unafraid of city men like Marvin.
But Marvin is the stronger, in many ways, because he's a stranger in a strange land and keeps his cool (as Marvin always does).
PRIME CUT goes from nasty set piece to nasty set piece. Hackman feels underused here. But even underused Hackman is still magnetic and electrifying.
Marvin plays the urbane flip side of his 1967 classic POINT BLANK mobster Walker. Whereas in POINT BLANK, Walker is all single minded focus on getting his money. . .and killing whoever he has to to get closer to that goal, Marvin's Nick, here, is a kind of sophisticated urbane professional. He shakes the hands of mothers. He politely engages with the local women at the fair.
All that 70’s swag. . .
PRIME CUT isn't as badass as GET CARTER or as psychedelically weird and beautiful as POINT BLANK but it belongs in the same conversation. The gangster going on a rampage to get what he's owed or looking for genre is a fascinating one.
Here, there are near Hitchcockian sequences of escapes from combine harvesters. There's also a nasty bit of fun on a houseboat when Nick confronts ex-girlfirend and current wife of Mary Ann, Clarabelle. She's even more cold blooded in her real-politik approach to sex and love than Mary Ann. And Nick's under no illusions.
PRIME CUT is a weird movie. But it's also a good one. And one brutally emblematic of the unsettled early 1970's when all taboos seemed shattered.
If you have 90 minutes and are ready for some quirky brutal violence in the heartland, you're in for a 70's cinema hidden treat.
Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club