Prime Cut (1972)

Go on, wave a flag and make me laugh.

Downhill Racer may have been a commercial disappointment, but there was enough evidence of Michael Ritchie’s talent to recommend him for other work. Shortly after Downhill Racer’s release, David V. Picker of United Artists brought up his name to none other than Paddy Chayefsky, who had recently pitched the idea of a medical satire set in a crumbling, underfunded hospital. Ritchie and Chayefsky had plenty in common – both were sledgehammer ironists at heart, and both had tried to adapt William Bradford Hue’s Three Lives for Mississippi with little success.¹ Unfortunately, the infamously uncompromising Chayefsky had little patience for Ritchie’s vision. Per Picker: “Paddy wanted his hospital to be old and seedy, with the greens, the tiles etc. Ritchie could not come up with what he wanted. So Paddy and I decided we had to do something about it.”

Or rather Picker’s assistant, Herb Jaffe, had to do something about it: “It was not an easy situation. Michael was a young guy and though we agreed to pay him his full fee ($100,000), I felt very bad about it. Then less than a month later, I read in Variety that Ritchie had already signed on for another movie, The Candidate, with his friend Robert Redford. On that deal he was also co-producer, which meant Redford couldn’t fire him. So I guess he learned something from Paddy Chayefsky.” Now in case you’re wondering why I’m not talking about The Candidate, it’s because that movie didn’t release until after Ritchie’s next film,² which was accepted “on the rebound” and which would compound Ritchie’s need to be in control of his work.

Kansas City Prime was the name of the script, its writer Robert Dillon, a man who had carved out something of a niche for himself with B movies like The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) and various “beach” movies – Beach Party (1963), Muscle Beach Party (1964), and Bikini Beach (1964) – before returning to the genre that marked his debut back in 1959. Kansas City Prime was a vicious, satirical gangster picture in the Gold Medal mould, one that seemed designed to cock a snook at the recently closed Hays Office with its depiction of animal cruelty, white slavery, sexual perversion, and “licentious or suggestive nudity,” not to mention a liberal smattering of the dreaded “pointed profanity.” Hell, even Dillon’s name was suggestive of the protagonist in countless Jim Thompson novels (most obviously 1946’s Heed the Thunder). Dillon would go on to inject the crime movie with bizarreness in Call Harry Crown (1974)³ and French Connection II (1975) and prompt John Frankenheimer – director of both movies – to call him “one of the most imaginative people I’d ever met.” But while those films (or maybe just Frankenheimer) would struggle with Dillon’s irreverent tone, Ritchie was more than a match for it, and the retitled Prime Cut would become a fierce and seedy highlight in both men’s careers.

Prime Cut starts as it means to go on, the lowing of agitated cattle competing with Lalo Schifrin’s borderline Muzak score, as we witness these poor cows herded, washed, slaughtered, and processed into the least appetising-looking link sausages you’ve ever seen. This would be grim enough, were it not for the fact that there’s clearly a human being in the mix, evidenced by a glimpse of skin and the appearance of a wristwatch on a joint of meat. This poor sucker was once an enforcer for the Chicago mob, sent to Kansas City to collect $500,000 in tribute. Naturally, this displeases head mobster Jake (Eddie Egan⁴), who dispatches Nick Devlin (Lee Marvin) as debt collector with some additional muscle. What they find in the prairies beggars belief: hayseed honcho Mary Ann (Gene Hackman) is running a sex trafficking operation when he isn’t turning mobsters into meat products, holding auctions for naked girls in hay-strewn pens. One of these girls is Poppy (Sissy Spacek), who Devlin takes “on account,” and when Mary Ann welches on his debt with extreme violence, Devlin decides to take the fight back to him. Hijinks, as they say, ensue.

What looks like a standard, if somewhat odd, gangster picture is actually one of the nastiest satires of American life in the ‘70s, with a queasy relevance in today’s talk of flyover states and coastal elites. Mary Ann gleefully dismisses urban power within the first half-hour of the movie: “You know what Chicago is? Chicago’s a sick old sow grunting for fresh cream. What it deserves is slop. Someday they’re gonna boil that town down for fat. Here, it’s different. This is the heartland.”

And what is that heartland? It’s a place where cheap-suited middle-aged men bid for strung-out naked girls (who have been provided by a Missouri orphanage), where all the henchmen are dungaree-wearing Aryans, where you’re liable to find a combine harvester paying homage to the crop duster in North by Northwest, and where the country fair is a riot of violence and conspicuous overconsumption. When the shooting starts, the marching band – squawking their way through “America the Beautiful” – barely misses a beat, because this is a community concerned only with feeding its face and pulling the trigger. The children are either corrupted – in the case of the slave girls⁵ – or corruptible, with a small boy only too happy to give up his pet cow (and push for a goat sale) for a fistful of greenbacks. The urban decay of Kansas City is no better, with ‘30s-looking flophouses full of rapists contrasting only slightly with the upmarket hotel dining room,⁶ in which another middle-aged man leers at a barely-clothed Poppy before Devlin offers a shark-like smile that puts him in his place.

There is no “good” in this world, only the loose chiffon of Christian civilisation dancing over the depravity. Devlin comes across as the hero of the piece, but only because he has some ethical code; everyone else (with the notable exception of Poppy) is in it for the money, the milk, or their own sexual satisfaction. The climax of the movie hammers this home with a simple exchange, with Mary Ann demanding Devlin kill him like a wounded animal, but Devlin asserting there’s a difference between man and beast. It’s not much of a difference, perhaps, but it’s an important one.

If this sounds like a ninety-minute attack on the rubes, then you forget this is a Michael Ritchie film. Ritchie offers no real judgment, merely portrays the degeneracy with a crooked grin. In many ways, the bloodthirsty hicks are no more repellent than the Chicago gangsters – I mean, when Eddie Egan’s the boss, you know you’re not dealing with altar boys – but they’re sophisticated enough to keep the worst of it under wraps. Mary Ann may be rough around the edges, but he’s no coarser than any other local businessman made good, and Hackman’s performance is a wonderful precursor to the chuckling, affable villains he’d play later in his career and a nice contrast with Gregory Walcott’s knuckleheaded Weenie.⁷ Hackman’s performance also provides a delicious counterpoint to Marvin’s put-upon stoicism, with Marvin delivering a typically great Marvin performance, mostly menace with a hint of irony. Where a director like Michael Mann would have turned their single-mindedness into a virtue, Ritchie makes it a running absurd joke.

And there are few actors who could have pulled off the role of Poppy with more charm than Sissy Spacek. Spacek apparently won her debut role thanks to an improvised song about maraschino cherries, and while she had reservations about the movie later – “They exploited me, but I exploited them.” – she manages to make Poppy more than the typical wayward hippie damsel so commonly seen in movies of this period. Despite some icky sexualisation, especially during the hotel dining room scene, Spacek manages to inject some dignity into an otherwise undignified role, and when Ritchie’s camera isn’t guilty of leering as much as the guy at the next table, it’s capable of more respectful framing. This may be in part due to Marvin’s presence – the original script called for a more romantic relationship between Devlin and Poppy, which Marvin refused to do, and so their relationship (weird as it is) is less man/woman, more parent/child, enhanced by Spacek’s wide-eyed performance.

Most of the cast looked back on Prime Cut with some mild disdain. Marvin had apparently taken on the role because his agent needed money, and famously railed against Ritchie in a Rolling Stone interview, saying “I hate that sonofabitch. He likes to use amateurs, because he can totally dominate them. Nothing worked with that guy, and the picture just fell apart before we got started.”⁸ Hackman was more gracious, but just as dismissive: “It had been five or six months since I had finished The French Connection and nobody knew about that, so it was a matter of a job at that point. It wasn’t especially rewarding … I’m not trying to put the picture down. It works on a certain level. I didn’t expect it to work any other way. It’s just that sometimes your working experiences are very exciting, sometimes they are not.”

As for Ritchie, he largely held his tongue. When he was asked to contribute to Donald Zec’s 1980 biography of Lee Marvin, he said: “I am prepared to talk about, say, Robert Redford, Walter Matthau or any other pleasurable subjects, but not about Lee Marvin. He said some wicked things about me to Rolling Stone and I am not disposed to reply in kind. Nor on the other hand am I disposed to say anything favourable either.” In truth, the shoot had been a rough one, with Marvin acting like Marvin – per Spacek, “when he’d had a few too many, his eyes turned ocean blue, and everybody gave him a wide berth.” – and Cinema Center Films, former CBS production company, spent their last weeks in business tinkering with Ritchie’s cut. According to Ritchie, the producers “injected the love story and the happy ending,” and jettisoning most of the pitch-black comedy of Ritchie’s vision. His ending would have been a mock-samurai stand-off between Mary Ann and Devlin, with the triumphant enforcer stepping out of the barn into the sunflower field. Instead we get an odd scene where Poppy punches the proprietor of the orphanage, releases the children (apparently into the wild), and heads off for a supposedly better life in Chicago, which is “as peaceful as anyplace anywhere.”

Ritchie’s cut did make it to a preview screening in Minneapolis, where it met with some success, but the wider release was the reshaped Prime Cut, and it baffled as much as it repelled. Ebert likened the movie to a comic strip and seemed to enjoy it as such, Sarris noted Ritchie’s “scenic compositions as derisive counterpoint to the bang-bang stuff,” but most were like Vincent Canby, who strained to come up with an effective analogy, suggesting Prime Cut was “as unsavoury and unappetising as a cheaper grade of packaged meat that is beginning to spoil.” None of these takes are wrong: Prime Cut is light on characterisation, heavy on the action, and liberally strewn with tonal offal. It is an impossible film to recommend – the ick is pervasive, even if it is precisely the point – but as a commercially minded swipe at Nixon’s America, it’s hard to beat. It may lack the prestige and panache of your average post-Watergate thriller, but it has a certain earthy, irreverent charm and deserves to be regarded as a quintessential stealth counterculture movie: Prime Cut may have no manners, but it’s a hell of critic.

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Next Up: “Too Handsome. Too Young. Too Liberal. Doesn’t have a chance. He’s PERFECT!”

1. The crime that inspired the book would ultimately form the basis of Mississippi Burning (1988).

2. One day after, to be precise. Prime Cut came out on 28th June 1972, with The Candidate following on the 29th. Patience, gentle reader. We’ll get to it next week.

3. No, I’m not going to type out its alternate title. It’s a pain in the arse. And not worth it for such a ludicrously awful film. Seriously, I know some people like it, but I get a fucking migraine just thinking about it.

4. Yes, I know. I forgot Egan was in this. Sorry, folks.

5. In a particularly nasty moment, a fistful of nickels shows exactly how corrupted one of these girls has become.

6. If anywhere looks like it smells like onion soup and cigarettes, it’s that place.

7. Sharp-eyed viewers may recognise Walcott from his most infamous movie, Plan 9 From Outer Space. “I didn’t want to be remembered for that,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2000, “but it’s better to be remembered for something than for nothing, don’t you think?” I certainly do. He’s great in this, by the way.

8. To be fair to Marvin, he was going through a hell of a time with the Michele Triola lawsuit in 1971 and was feeling a bit raw about Hackman’s Academy Award nomination for I Never Sang for My Father (1970). In an interview with Hackman biographer Michael Munn, Marvin stepped back a little: “I’d probably had a little too much booze inside of me when I said those things. Okay, so I didn’t hit it off with Michael Ritchie, and I got pissed off about some things, but if I said anything out of order, which I probably did, I shouldn’t have done. And I’m very sorry. Maybe I felt a little left out of the Gene Hackman Appreciation Society. I mean, Gene, God knows, is a great actor and a great guy, but he wasn’t the only actor in the film, for chrissakes.”