By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on January 25,2025)

Prime Cut  (KL Studio Classics)

This spare and offbeat 1972 “heartland noir” from director Michael Ritchie (with a tight screenplay by Robert Dillon) features one of my favorite Lee Marvin performances. He’s a cleaner for an Irish mob out of Chicago who is sent to collect an overdue payment from a venal livestock rancher (Gene Hackman) with the unlikely moniker of “Mary Ann”.

In addition to overseeing his meat packing plant (where the odd debt collector ends up as sausage filler), Mary Ann maintains a (literal) stable of naked, heavily sedated young women for auction. He protects his spread with a small army of disturbingly uber-Aryan young men who look like they were cloned in a secret Nazi lab.

It gets even weirder, yet the film has a strangely endearing quality; perhaps due to its blend of pulpy thrills, dark comedy and ironic detachment. It’s fun watching Hackman and Marvin go mano a mano; and seeing Sissy Spacek in her film debut. Also with Gregory Walcott (a hoot as Mary Ann’s oafish, psychotic brother) and Angel Tompkins.

Gene Polito’s artful cinematography comes to the fore with Kino’s new 4K transfer, taken from the original 35mm camera negative (delivering an image far superior to the 2014 German Region B Blu-ray, which I happily retired). No extras to speak of, but there are two new commentary tracks, one by a Lee Marvin biographer and another by two film historians.