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I gotta admit that I really do enjoy these early-to-mid-seventies H-wood features that I missed out during the days when I had a hard time telling the difference between boys and girls or something like that. You still had the near-godlike old time actors from the forties and fifties in 'em not to mention the same kind of hard-driving heart pounding plots that put studios like Warner's on the map, only now these kinda flickers were jam-packed with things ya just couldn't get away with before like cussing, bloody violence and (best of all) BARED SUCKEMS!!!
Ya sure get a whole load of all that in PRIME CUT, a moom which really exemplifies the Hollywood cusp between the old style and the new amorality. Imagine the best of some fifties mob/crime flick with alla the blood and guts (an' I do mean it!) that just weren't allowed way back when as well as some tit scenes that woulda given Will Hays either a massive heart attack or an even more massive hard on (these scenes are mild enough but sometimes your mind slips into wet dream mode even when you're awake and what an embarrassment!). Whatever, this 'un's a pretty slick deal.
Maybe it's molasses slow here/there but when the gas pedal is pushed to the floor PRIME CUT can be just about everything you wanted in a good underworld film but weren't allowed to watch in front of your parents. Or even now if your wife's that much of a prudish harridan who leads you around by the ring embedded into your corona.
Lee Marvin plays even more detached before turning into Bongo the Gorilla self as Irish Mob enforcer Nick Devlin. He's an iceberg of a cool guy who travels with a small cadre from Chicago to Kansas City so's he can collect on a debt from Gene Hackman, a particularly off-turning redneck who goes by the name "Mary Ann" (!) and has no intention of paying one thin dime owed. Considering what his predecessors went through this ain't just any ol' task for Marvin...Hackman and his hayseeds play pretty rough ball as you can tell by the opening scene where one of the earlier enforcers is processed into hot dogs and mailed back to his place of origin.
Hackman does a good biz himself not only with the meat-grinding game but with the doob and poppies grown in his own greenhouse. Being an enterprising sort he even dabbles in prostitution, being supplied by ample young maidens procured from the local orphanage as soon as they're ripe for pickin'. As an upstanding member of the local community Junior Achievement is very important to him.
None other'n Sissy Spacek's one of the sides of a completely different piece of meat up for auction who Devlin, kind-hearted soul that he is, actually rescues and has dolled up as she spills many a bean about not only Hackman's deal but a strange neo-lezbo relationship she has with her fellow inmate and "sister" Violet. Considering the amt. of screen time in which Spacek shows off not only her dairies but some hindquarter and even a flash of curlies, you kinda wonder how she could get off telling John Lennon that he went too far!
It's a beautifully violent ride from thereon in what with a wild shoot out scene at a state fair and a getcha by the throat segment where Marvin and Spacek are chased through a field by a combine harvester (the conclusion to that particular episode sure made for some natural "Metal Machine Music" accompanied by on-screen vehicular carnage that's definitely one of the highlights of this messterpiece)!
Can't say 'nuff 'bout the acting, what with Marvin in patented bared-wire intensity mode and Hackman playing it so disgusting to the point where you're just itching to see him cash in his chips, painfully at that. Even Spacek, who to me represents a whole load of what I would call the less appealing aspects of Amerigan womanhood, does swell in a somewhat neo-retarded way. Hefty bonus points go to PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE's Gregory Walcott as Hackman's brother "Weenie", a particularly thuggish individual who's seen in the opening processing the last visitor from out of town into num nums for your next 4th of July picnic (I tell ya, if Upton Sinclair had lived a good four more years and saw this 'un he'd just die). The weird fight scene Walcott has with Hackman where they even rough and tumble over the accountants across the room was strictly outta leftfieldsville, and he's the only guy I've seen, at least in a dramatic film, who tries to kill someone by stabbing him with a sausage.
I assume this 'un's better'n all those new dramatic type of flickers that pop up at the local bunkers not to mention on Paramount and various other cable ripoff stations. Not exactly a five-starrer but it sure made for a way better time 'n reading most of those boo-hoo sites that various eighties rockcrit survivors have been dumping on us as of late that's for sure!
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