Well, Sissy Spacek is very young and sweet (her first film). Gene Hackman, great talent but not great role here, he's like a negative character caricature. Lee Marvin, tough guy as usual, also does not have a great role (is the script's fault, which is not one of the best). But, as it is, not a great script, another director, like Sergio Leone for example, would have made something exceptional of it. Lalo Schifrin's music also is not one of his best. I love Sissy Spacek, Gene Hackman and Lee Marvin very very much, they are all three among my favorite actors ever but, I will not watch this one again, once it's enough.

Michael Ritchie's lurid--maybe vile is the better choice--gangster against gangster flick, Prime Cut is beyond description because, 30+ years after seeing it, I still don't know what kind of movie it was trying to be.Let's see. We have a grizzled he-man, gentleman hit-man in Lee Marvin, a rapist-pillager with a woman's name in Gene Hackman, a Hackman brother who reminded me of the goons in the old Popeye cartoons, and a young woman who is so surreal in her beauty (Sissy Spacek) that there is no way she could have been brought up in an orphanage specifically to be sold as a sex slave. There's meat-packing, milk-tasting, white-slaving, and the Cadillac Fleetwood getting eaten by a thresher. Don't forget the Irish mobsters, all loyalty and mother's love, Hackman sneering at Chicago being a rotten old sow looking for fresh cream (I kid you not), and that dinner with Marvin's Nick Devlin and Poppy (Spacek).I might get an argument from some about the natural loveliness of a young Spacek. Those eyes could just burn holes through you. I don't know her life story, but I'm wondering if she, as a kid, would turn that look on, and she would get whatever she wanted. In Prime Cut, for some reason, Ritchie puts Spacek--who knows nothing about proper, adult manners in a restaurant, or propriety in clothing choices, for that matter--in a nice, at-the-top-of-a-hotel eatery across from Marvin. He shows her which utensils to use and when. He gives her fatherly smiles of calming encouragement. He gives an I'm-going-to-kill-you look to a middle-aged man who is staring at Spacek. Her gown is see-through. Now, don't get me wrong. For years this has been my favorite part of Prime Cut, the care and feeding of the iguana residing inside my old brain. But the more I think about it, using my upper primate- hairless ape brain, the more appalled I am at this scene.Spacek is a victim of sexual slavery. She has been purchased by Marvin to save her. He dresses her, feeds her, reassures her, then parades her into a restaurant wearing something that covers only her lap. Marvin doesn't rape Spacek, but it's that feeling that he's showing off a fresh piece of meat to the world, that he has power and authority. Kind of like a "benign dictator."If you can get your iguana to settle down, you may find that the restaurant scene ruins the movie.I've found myself hating Prime Cut because of its almost- pornographic attention to throwing in anything and everything amoral just to get a rise out of the audience.But Prime Cut is almost a traffic-accident in its ability to draw your attention. It's the rescue aspect of the story, mixed in with the good-bad guys sent to discipline the bad-bad guys tension, the weird names for Hackman and Gregory Walcott, the evil lure of seeing all those drugged, naked girls for sale in pens, Lee Marvin sent to do a job for Eddie Egan wearing white bucks, the way you'll never really feel comfortable eating wieners again, Spacek's innocent appreciation of Marvin's benevolence while you and the guy at the next table are staring at her nipples, the shooting of the fat guy in the combine, the masticulation of the Caddy, and that moment when I knew Prime Cut was beyond classification, when Marvin looks down in disgust at Hackman's plate at the girl sale.He states/asks/accuses, "You eat guts."I have weird dreams on a regular basis, nothing bad, just weird. I wake up rested but feeling a little disjointed, and sometimes the dreams are so vivid, it takes a moment for me to return to reality.Prime Cut is like one of my dreams, only I have to go searching for it (on average, once every two to three years) instead of it coming to me.And, as far as Sissy Spacek's nipples are concerned, why do you think I sleep on my side instead of on my back?

Days have been so hot lately I had to keep the air conditioner on all the night to prevent the room from turning into a human furnace. The trouble is that the machine is quite noisy and I had to reduce the volume on TV to let my wife sleep. Now, where am I going with these pointless details? I'm telling you.Yesterday I had the unpleasant discovery that the subtitles option didn't work on my "Prime Cut" DVD, so I could hardly hear what was said between characters. And the oddest thing is that it didn't undermine my understanding, let alone my enjoyment, not at all. Now I can see why Roger Ebert compared Michael Ritchie's movie to a comic strip: it's a movie defined by actions, reactions and interactions rather than a complex and intelligible plot, and in fact, what the film could afford was precisely what it needed. However, I doubt such a film can be possibly made today, when high-budgets and all-star casts became the new standard. Now, viewers need their minds to be blown and eyes stunned by the unusual, the stuff that elevates them, for 100 minutes, above their ordinariness and "Prime Cut" doesn't have such ambitious purposes. But it works for one simple reason: it's a film that knows where it goes, and trusts the presence of two great actors: Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman, with a honorable mention for Sissy Spacek, in her first and much promising film debut.These are faces that can do without wisecracks or clever one-liners, when you see them; you know exactly what role they're assigned to. Marvin is the experienced and bad-ass debt collector, Hackman is the charismatic corrupt cattle owner and slaughterhouse operator and Spacek is the innocent fair-haired victim. Marvin has the obligatory macho magnetism, Hackman that lively sparkle that makes him even more likable than his enemy and Spacek, as usual, magnificently conveys the poignant fragility of the poor rural girl, victim of unfortunate circumstances. And when these personality traits are all set-up, we confidently follow the action, trusting the actors' capacity to transcend the limits of these two-dimensional archetypes and provide great entertainment. But faces aren't sometimes enough and the director enriches a rather rudimentary narrative with a unique touch: the setting. Marvin belongs to the Chicago mob, but it's in Hackman's territory that the job must be done, in Arkansas. And don't be fooled by its bucolic appeal, the film hides an even dirtier business than anything you could find in the city. Indeed, the film doesn't feature drug dealers, no pimps, no ethnic gangsters, no screeching police sirens, no cats crawling under trash cans, the bad guys are all typically wasp with hair as blonde as the wheat fields their monotonous lives have always basked in. This is the underrated Mid-West, America's wheat-belt that gives the film an unlikely escapist value, almost Western-like, à la Sam Peckinpah with Lee Marvin replacing Steve McQueen or Warren Oates. And on the violence department, the film has nothing to envy from 'Bloody Sam' work.Danger is always present "naturally" starting with the impressive depiction of the slaughterhouse during the opening credits, when we follow the poor cows lead by the machinery that will turn them into steaks. I strongly suspect that among the millions of people who saw the film since its release, a few of them were converted to vegetarianism after witnessing the macabre spectacle. The credits ends with an intriguing oddity reminding us that it's still a gangster film: a shoe accidentally falls down from the sausage-maker. We get the point, whoever operates the slaughter house (it turns out to be Hackman) his enemies might end up sleeping with the cows. And this is not even the most shocking aspect of the plot that seems like a breath of fresh air, from the boring perspective of our prudish political correct days. In fact, the notion of meat and flesh is so ambiguous that even the titles "Prime Cut" carries some disturbing undertones. And the surprise comes less from the revelation than its graphic depiction: poor naked girls being held in cattle pens and auctioned to avid rich men. Please, think about it twice before branding it as 'misogynistic': no film today would dare such sights, but aren't they metaphorically significant? Isn't the only difference between that human slavery and what goes today contentment? Aren't girls eager today to be posing as fresh meats for greedy voyeurs, except that movies and social networks replaced the cattle pens? There's a thin line between forced and deliberate prostitution the film clearly exposes. It's made even more explicit through the fourth memorable character of the film: Angel Tompkins as Hackman's luscious wife, so amorally seductive that the word 'gold-digger' becomes a euphemism that doesn't fool anyone. It's for such gutsy moves like that that I will forever cherish the "New Hollywood" period when the humblest action-packed flicks weren't to be underestimated.And "Prime Cut" flirts with subversive subjects through little glimpses, but it knows we needn't to be too preached about, and action must prevail. And for the thrills, the film provides an unforgettable wheat-field chase where hand-in-hand Marvin and Spacek escape from a combine harvester. And despite their predictable outcome, the gunfights and final shootouts are not without surprises. Michael Ritchie also directed "The Candidate" the same year, a film I enjoyed but wished it dug a bit deeper in its subject, but for "Prime Cut", packed-up in less than ninety minutes, it was enough. So I would cheerfully compare "Prime Cut" to its defining element: meat. I enjoyed the film the way I enjoy a good steak: raw, with some tender sides, others 'harder-to-swallow", bloody the way it should, and not too overcooked. And when the plate is empty and you think you want more, a few minutes later, you realize you were plenty satisfied.

What a bonkers movie this is: gangsters turned into sausages, naked teenage virgins sold at cattle markets, a hard man called Mary Ann, car-eating combine harvesters, sausage-wielding hit-men - this one's got them all. It's also got Lee Marvin acting very cool as a dapper fixer for the Irish mob in Chicago who's dispatched to the mid-west to secure payment from a defaulting Gene Hackman who literally turned their last enforcer into sausage-meat. This one has a real 70s feel to it even though it's not generally recognised as a classic - which, of course, it isn't: character development is zero and the bad guys are like something out of a 1940's comic strip. Despite that, it's great fun - and Sissy Spacek, who isn't generally regarded as a classic beauty, looks gorgeous.