Tag Archives: Prime Cut (1972)

Prime Cut at 50: looking back at possibly the strangest American crime film of the 1970s

Want to talk about one of the strangest, if not the strangest American crime film to emerge in the first half of the 1970s? Then, let’s talk about Michael Ritchie’s neo-noir Prime Cut, as it turns fifty this year. It would be going too far to describe it as a neglected classic, but it is a fascinating film about a divided America that, as a result, finds obvious echoes today. 

You can read my piece on Prime Cut in full at the CrimeReads site here.Read more

Prime Cut

Want to talk about a movie that broke the mould when it was made?

Let’s talk about Prime Cut.

Starring Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman and Sissy Spacek, this 1972 film is eighty-eight minutes of pulp weirdness – part exploitation flick, part brutal, hard-boiled, crime story.

Prime Cut was directed by Michael Ritchie, who did no other work of any consequence (with the possible exception of The Candidate, also made in 1972), and written by another relative unknown, Robert Dillon.

Marvin plays Nick Devlin, a tough as nails enforcer who is hired to go to Kansas City and retrieve half a million dollars owed to the Chicago mob by a slaughterhouse Kingpin called Mary Ann (Hackman).

Driving all night, Devlin and his men arrive at Mary Ann’s ranch in the middle of a livestock auction. The slaughterhouse is a legitimate business as well as being a front for a white slavery racket. Groups of well-dressed men wander around the inside of a giant barn, bidding on drugged, naked women, Mary Ann’s ‘livestock’, who have been sourced from orphanages and bus stops.

One of the girls, Poppy (Spacek), manages to ask for help through her drug haze. Marvin takes her ‘on credit’ and leaves, after getting Mary Ann’s agreement to meet him next day and hand over the money.… Read more