Prime Cut (1972)

PRIME CUT  (1972)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Michael Ritchie
    Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman, Sissy Spacek,
    Gregory Walcott, Angel Tompkins, Janit Baldwin
In his entry on Lee Marvin in "The Biographical Dictionary of Film", David Thomson calls Marvin "the last of the great wintry heroes," and you can see some of that in "Prime Cut". Marvin plays Nick Devlin, a mob enforcer dispatched to Kansas City to collect a payment from a cattleman named Mary Ann (Gene Hackman), who's been skimming the profits and denying the boys in Chicago their share of the take. In addition to beef and pork, Mary Ann sells women, specifically teenaged girls, exhibited naked in livestock pens like all the other animals. One of them, a wide-eyed kid named Poppy (Sissy Spacek), catches Devlin's eye and he whisks her away, a visibly aging knight and an adolescent damsel in distress. This is a movie that could only have gotten made and released in the early 1970s, during the five or six years between "Easy Rider" and "Jaws", when the studios were grasping at straws and a filmmaker with enough daring and originality could break the rules sometimes, which Ritchie did. The movie's compulsively transgressive, from the way Hackman chows down on a plateful of guts (I'm not kidding) to the squalid flophouse where one of the girls gets passed around to the resident bums at a nickel a throw. Marvin's white-haired, gray-suited Devlin is the film's hard, cold moral center, a guy who's revolted by what he sees, but knows he can't always do much about it. His relationship with Poppy is ambiguous. Nothing really happens between them, at least on screen, but there's something in the way he looks at her, especially when she's not wearing much, that makes you wonder. She says she loves him, and apparently means it, but his motives remain mysterious to the end. Gregory Walcott's casual grossness as a butcher named Weenie stands out in a movie that's all about meat, and if the opening credits don't cause you to weigh the positive aspects of becoming a vegetarian, you'll probably be a carnivore for life. Spacek's first film.