Prime Cut
D: Michael Ritchie (1972); with Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman, Sissy Spacek, Angel Tompkins, Gregory Walcott. It’s never a good idea to think too hard about what’s really in a hot dog. A gangster is delivered back to his hometown in the form of a package of weenies from Mary Ann’s Meats in Kansas City, and it’s Nick Devlin’s (Marvin) job to go down there and straighten things out. He rounds up the rest of his crew (with names like Shaughnessy, Delaney, and O’Brien), piles them into a Cadillac limo, and together they head south to confront Mary Ann (Hackman). On arriving, they find Mary Ann devouring a plate of tripe and other unidentifiable cattle innards. One of Mary Ann’s sidelines is white slavery, with drugged-up girls lying nude in cattle pens waiting for high bidders to take them away. Among them is Poppy (Spacek, in her debut role), a pathetically naive girl whom Devlin takes under his wing. Soon there’s a shootout at a county fair, a typically bucolic Middle American setting that Norman Rockwell might have dreamed up (only without the guns and blood). As things progress, there’s a shootout with the towheaded, overall-wearing goons in a wheat field, and the Irish hoods’ Caddy is devoured piece by piece by a farm combine, then spit out the back. In a fairly spectacular stunt, Devlin says damn-the-torpedoes-and-full-speed-ahead as he rams an18-wheeler through the length of a greenhouse at 60 mph. It’s preposterous drive-in fun, tasteless, sleazy, sophomoric, and entertaining as hell, with a fair amount of bloodletting and naked flesh to keep things entertaining. Marvin seems to be slightly tongue-in-cheek throughout; Walcott plays Weenie, Mary Ann’s oversized, dimwit brother with a gimme cap and a violent streak. Director Ritchie keeps things going in fairly workmanlike fashion; the bland grandeur of the Great Midwest, Breadbasket of America, makes an interesting setting for a gang war between dark-suited Chicago hoods and farmboy toughs who’d look more at home on a John Deere.This article appears in Carol Keeton Rylander.