'PRIME CUT'........MEAT 'N GREET IN THE HEARTLAND.....

Prime Cut (1972)  arrived decades too early for anyone to fully appreciate the deeply humorous peculiarity of it......a standard gangster story filmed as though it was a live action version of a comic book for adults. Watching it today, you can think of it as brilliantly sunlit version of the "Sin City" movies.....with everything in it deliberately amped up to larger than life dimensions.

             In 1972, few critics or audience members figured out what screenwriter Robert Dillon was up to......taking all the tropes of well worn gangster shoot 'em ups and and presenting them as simple primal images and characters, with spare, pithy dialogue suitable to encase in round white balloons hovering over their heads.

              While "Prime Cut" maintains a studied, coolness under Michael Ritchie's direction, Dillon took his cartoon-gangster obsession to the next level with his 1974 script to John Frankenheimer's "99 & 44/100% Dead", dialing up the material into a campy spoof. (We absolutely promise to cover this one in a future post).  But camp was a dying style in the mid-70's (see our post on "Doc Savage")....and Frankenheimer disowned the movie while he was still in the midst of shooting it......

             "Prime Cut", unlike that film,  doesn't poke you in the ribs.....it simply invites you to watch it unfold and laugh quietly to yourself, shaking your head. Lalo Schifrin's music bounces cheerfully through the opening credits, in which a dead Chicago hood travels through the length of a meat packing plant's assembly line, finally emerging as a string of hot dogs shipped back to his Windy City big boss. (Eddie Egan, the ex NYC cop who inspired "The French Connection")

               Having a henchman converted into wieners doesn't sit well with Eddie, so he hires cooler-than-cool enforcer Devlin (Lee Marvin, slyly granite-faced) to collect overdue debts owed by renegade gangster-meat-packer Mary Anne, the perpetrator of the Oscar Meyer assassination. (played with a wink and a vile chuckle by Gene Hackman,,,,,and don't even ask us why he's called Mary Anne)

               The garrulous good ole boy Mary Anne and his troglodyte brother Weenie (Gregory Walcott, randomly munching hot dogs to live up to his character's name) operate a vast Kansas City cattle empire where they also auction off drugged, naked teenage girls, raised like prime beef in their very own 'orphanage'.

              So it's off to the heartland with Devlin and his three baby-faced, business-suited Irish hench-lads.....where their long black limousine invades the wide open spaces of  Hackman's sprawling, sun-drenched lair, protected by a small army of Aryan-blonde farmboys armed with pitchforks and shotguns......

              Here's where our comic book clash of the titans goes into high gear, with Marvin and Hackman trading brief, nasty words (Hackman resorts to his infectious giggling while he shovels down a plate of pork intestines...."You eat guts," snaps Marvin. "Yep," giggles Hackman, "I like 'em")  Never one to mince words (as opposed to his meals), Hackman ends their conversation with a penis measuring challenge....so much for subtlety.....)

             The film startlingly offers the first big studio rendition of a human-trafficking sex slave market, with naked girls draped around bales of hay.......but it isn't really there to shock or disgust anyone (except Marvin's character, maybe),,,,,in this movie, it's just another quick visual sick joke, one of many prodding at the hidden depravity beneath the amber waves of grain.....(In fact, director Ritchie would move on make his reputation as something of a social satirist, with "The Candidate" taking on politics and "Smile" eviscerating beauty pageants.)

            To Hackman's outrage, Marvin rescues one of the drugged sex slaves (Sissy Spacek in her film debut), later dressing her up like an inflatable sex doll in see-thru gowns. (Well, we did warn you this was comic book stuff for adults, right?)

               The rest of the film's mercifully swift 86 minute running time is mostly devoted to the deliberately broad-daylight, Hitchcock-homage action set pieces. (Michael Ritchie and his editor knew how long they could sustain this nonsense.....unlike today's comic-book movie directors who think they're making 'Gone With The Wind' with spandex and capes...)

               In true "North By Northwest" fashion, Marvin and Spacek escape the farmboy gestapo in the middle of a county fair turkey shoot, .....and then race through a wheat field, literally pursued by a Grim Reaper.....a massive Harvester machine operated by some tubby guy who looks a refugee from "Hee Haw". (In this movie, the Heartland folk are depicted as either casual observers of carnage, murderous minions,  or dispassionate buyers of Hackman's girl-flesh meat market)

              Marvin efficiently wraps things up with a ferocious firefight in middle of a sunflower field and a final go-round with Hackman, Walcott and what's left of the flaxen farmboys. In the meantime, you can ponder the future relationship between Marvin and Spacek.....imagining the further adventures of this slick, cold hitman and his teenage girl-toy,who still speaks as if in a permanent drug haze...

             "Prime Cut" took a lot of heat for its over-the-top violence, highly exaggerated characters and outlandish action sequences........in other words, everything that garnered Quentin Tarantino massive amounts of praise, hailing him as a groundbreaking visionary for recycling all the crap he watched as a video store clerk.  Sorry, Quentin, but "Prime Cut"  plowed this ground long before you supposedly broke it......and that's why we'll slice off 4 stars (****).......Forget Arby's, this is the movie that ....
.....has the meats!!