Prime Cut (1972)
Directed by Michael Ritchie
Starring Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman, Sissy Spacek
86 minutes
I had seen this movie once a while back...
Prime Cut starts off with a slice of what the inside of a meat factory is like. A man is murdered and turned into sausage while there is some very comforting music in the background.
The sausages are sent to some gangsters in Chicago. To get even, the Chicago boss hires tough guy Nick Devlin (Lee Marvin) to go to Kansas City to take care of business.
In Kansas City, Devlin goes to the farm where he confronts Mary Ann (Gene Hackman), the man responsible for the sausages. At the barn there’s an unusual type of animal for sale. Human females.
These females have been drugged up and are basically sex slaves. Marvin, probably feeling sympathy for one for women, “takes” one. This girl is called Poppy (Sissy Spacek) and we learn that she had grown up in a orphanage and knows very little of the world. Devlin takes good care of her.
By the end of the movie there’s some action at a fair, which leads to a wild chase with a “wheat” machine and a predictable shootout at the end.
This movie is simple in some ways but complex in others ways. What I liked was how well some of it’s put together. The angles of the camera are very imaginative. The perspective that the audience is put into especially in the driving scenes are fun... it’s as if we’re part of the action. The length of time of some shots is tense (especially compared to the hyper edited films that we see so often now).
Marvin may be a very underrated movie star and he deserves more credit. In this movie he’s completely in control from beginning to end.
Sissy Spacek sure shows a lot of tits in this movie...
I’m not so sure what to think about this movie overall. From the beginning of the film, we all know that this is going to have a lot of “black” humor. The structure of the movie is fairly simple and I was satisfied by the length. We don’t learn very much about the background of most characters but perhaps it’s for the best. This movie might be an example of an early action movie...
Prime Cut is entertaining but it’s not a movie that requires a lot of thinking while watching. 3 star out of 5.
