Prime Cut (4K UHD Review)
Director
Michael RitchieRelease Date(s)
1972 (August 20, 2024)Studio(s)
Cinema Center Films/National General Pictures (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: B+
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
Michael Ritchie’s Prime Cut may not be as well-remembered today as other Lee Marvin thrillers from the same period like Point Blank, but it’s just as much of a landmark American crime film. Prime Cut is an unforgettably bitter slice of Americana that’s as perversely caustic as it is mordantly funny. Ritchie had made a splash with his debut feature Downhill Racer in 1969, which utilized real-world locations and individuals to give its fictional story an almost documentary feeling of verisimilitude. It’s a style that he returned to with The Candidate in 1972 and Smile in 1975, before turning to ostensibly more mainstream comedy fare with The Bad News Bears in 1976 (although as anyone familiar with that film can attest, it’s no less subversive in its own nasty way). Prime Cut was released the same year as The Candidate, and while it seemed like a bit of an outlier at the time, it was actually a transitional film that signaled the way that Ritchie would end up taking seemingly straightforward genre material and deconstructing it through his viciously satirical lens. Point Blank had reinvented neo-noir thrillers, but Prime Cut ran the genre through a literal meat grinder.
Prime Cut was written by Robert Dillon, but it’s easy to believe that Ritchie had a hand in shaping the story. Nick Devlin (Marvin) is an enforcer for the Chicago mob who takes a team down to Kansas City in order to collect some overdue debts from slaughterhouse owner Mary Ann (Gene Hackman). Mary Ann and his brother “Weenie” (Gregory Walcott) have had a bad habit of returning previous enforcers back to Chicago after grinding them into sausage, but perhaps just as disturbingly, cattle aren’t the only prime flesh that they’re selling on the open market. They also run a profitable business in human trafficking, raising young women as sexual slaves and auctioning them to the highest bidder. Nick has seen it all in his time, but when a young victim named Poppy (Sissy Spacek) begs him for help, he decides to intervene and frees her from Mary Ann’s clutches. That raises the stakes between the two antagonists, leading to an inevitable conflict that turns Mary Ann’s slaughterhouse into a true killing ground. Prime Cut also stars Angel Tompkins, Janit Baldwin, and Eddie Egan.
Needless to say, Prime Cut isn’t exactly subtle in the way that draws a connection between the economic exploitation of animals and humans alike. The opening credit sequence follows Weenie through the slaughterhouse as he shepherds Nick’s predecessor through the gruesome assembly line that turns living flesh into dead meat. At one point, the bare ass of Weenie’s human victim is visible alongside the rest of the livestock, emphasizing his vulnerability to exploitation. When Nick first encounters Poppy and the rest of the girls at the auction, they’re just as naked and vulnerable, corralled into cattle pens. As far as Mary Ann is concerned, meat is meat:
“Cow flesh, girl flesh, all the same to me. What they’re buyin’, I’m sellin’. Everybody wants what I got. Grade A. Prime stuff. Raised special. Course, we gotta keep ’em a little doped up. Uppers, downers, all the livestock gets their shots.”
While Prime Cut is hardly a vegan manifesto (although its frank depiction of slaughterhouse activities may have made more than one viewer consider swearing off meat for good), Ritchie’s real target was the true heartland of America: an economy that’s driven by rampant consumption of all kinds. It’s a system where anything and everything can be exploited, commodified, and marketed. Consumption itself has been weaponized against the consumer (a fact that’s symbolized in the film when Weenie tries to stab Nick with a sausage). Considered from that perspective, there really isn’t much of a difference between the cow flesh and the girl flesh as marketed by Mary Ann. They’re both just commodities that have been bred for the slaughter, feeding the pipeline to satiate different but equally strong desires, all in the name of profit.
The key to American consumerism as presented in Prime Cut is that both the cattle and the human livestock have been divorced from their intrinsic value as individual beings. In Carol J. Adams’ 1990 book The Sexual Politics of Meat, she used a concept that she called the “absent referent” to explain how this process works. Meat only exists because the animals themselves no longer exist: “If animals are alive they cannot be meat. Thus a dead body replaces the live animal. Without animals there would be no meat eating, yet they are absent from the act of eating meat because they have been transformed into food.” Similarly, when women are transformed into sex objects, they cease to be real women in the eyes of those who use them solely for sexual gratification. Their lost humanity becomes the absent referent.
It’s a dehumanizing process, and Nick’s chosen profession as a hired killer has left him a little dehumanized as well. Yet he hasn’t been completely desensitized, as his willingness to meet the mother of one of his crew demonstrates. So, it’s not entirely out of left field that he’s open to Poppy’s pleas for help. Poppy has also been dehumanized by the all drugs and abuse that she’s experienced at the hands of Mary Ann’s crew, beaten down to the point where she accepts being little more than a passive sex object. Eventually, they both help each other to regain a bit of their lost humanity. The script originally had the two of them becoming romantically entangled, but Marvin wisely rejected that idea and insisted on changing that angle of the story. His instincts were correct, because the power imbalance between the two of them would have made any sexualized relationship feel just as exploitative. They end up forming something of surrogate father/daughter relationship instead, with Nick not exactly oblivious to Poppy’s sexuality, but completely unmoved by it.
Of course, their mutual rejection of an economic system built on exploitation and consumption means that the system itself is going to come after them, and with a vengeance, too. In one of Prime Cut’s most memorable set pieces, Nick and Poppy are chased through a hay field by a giant, toothy combine that’s being operated by an obese young farmhand. Before the chase even begins, Ritchie takes a moment to show the machine consuming the hay in front of it and defecating out hay bales behind it, an image that’s echoed at the end of the chase when the combine chews up an entire car and shits out the car parts instead. Anything and everything is fodder for consumption, and the machine always needs to be fed.
Again, Prime Cut is hardly a subtle film, and that’s not even taking into account the strange incestual homoeroticism on display between Mary Ann and Weenie. (The two of them have a fully clothed wrestling match together that’s every bit as homoerotic as the nude one in Ken Russell’s adaptation of Women in Love.) For Michael Ritchie, satire was a hammer that he used to drive his points home, and he treated that hammer like a blunt weapon. If consumption can be weaponized, then so can satire. Few other filmmakers have ever weaponized satire to the degree that Ritchie did, and that’s one reason why Prime Cut is such a landmark film. There have been plenty of other satires that involved the consumption of meat, like Paul Bartel’s Eating Raoul and Bob Balaban’s Parents, but none of them used the sexual politics of meat in order to indict the entire American economic system. Yet Ritchie’s targets were just as broad as his satire, and that’s one reason why Prime Cut has lost none of its bite over the last half century. Audiences in 1972 weren’t particularly interested in what he was selling to them, but Prime Cut remains as potent as ever in the modern American marketplace.
Cinematographer Gene Polito shot Prime Cut on 35mm film using Panavision cameras with anamorphic lenses, framed at 2.39:1 for its theatrical release. This version is based on a 4K scan of the original camera negative, cleaned up and graded for High Dynamic Range in both Dolby Vision and HDR10. With the usual caveat that the opening credits and any other optical work throughout the rest of the film were derived from dupe elements, so they’re softer than the surrounding material, everything else is beautifully resolved for a Panavision film from this period. It’s still not the sharpest film on the format, but there’s noticeably more detail than was present on Kino’s previous Blu-ray version, and the grain is smoother as well. The only remaining damage are a few faint single-frame scratches that won’t even be visible on most displays when seen from typical viewing distances. While the HDR grade doesn’t exaggerate anything, with the red of the combine being richly saturated but never oversaturated, it does offer improved contrast compared to the old Blu-ray—shadow detail is markedly improved. Michael Ritchie (and Gene Polito!) fans will find little to complain about here.
Audio is offered in English 5.1 and 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English subtitles. Prime Cut was released theatrically in mono, but both the 5.1 and the 2.0 track here offer limited stereo spread, so it’s not clear what they were derived from. It’s not just processed mono, either, as there are definite directionalized sound effects and stereo spread from Lalo Schifrin’s score. The 2.0 track doesn’t appear to have encoded surround channels, so it may be a fold-down of the 5.1 mix. On the other hand, surround usage in the 5.1 track is sparse anyway, so pick whichever one that you prefer. Either way, there’s not much noise or distortion present, the dialogue is clear, and Schifrin’s score rings through. (As an aside, for whatever reason, his work here has never been released on a soundtrack album.)
Kino Lorber’s 4K Ultra HD release of Prime Cut is a two-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film, as well as a slipcover that duplicates the theatrical poster artwork on the insert. The following extras are included:
DISC ONE: UHD
- Audio Commentary by Dwayne Epstein
- Audio Commentary by Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson
DISC TWO: BD
- Audio Commentary by Dwayne Epstein
- Audio Commentary by Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson
- Trailer (HD – 2:34)
- Gorky Park Trailer (HD – 2:24)
- Dog Day Trailer (SD – 2:29)
- Mississippi Burning Trailer (SD – 1:37)
- The Package Trailer (HD – 2:15)
- Thunderbolt and Lightfoot Trailer (HD – 2:10)
- Charley Varrick Trailer (HD – 2:31)
- Brannigan Trailer (HD – 2:23)
- 3 Days of the Condor Trailer (HD – 3:05)
- Fletch Trailer (HD – 1:35)
Kino Lorber is offering not one but two brand new commentary tracks. The first is with Dwayne Epstein, author of the biography Lee Marvin: Point Blank. Epstein interviewed some of the participants in the film while researching his book, but he says that 60% of the information that he gives throughout the track came from actor Gregory Walcott. (He also corrects some misinformation on the notoriously unreliable IMDb). Naturally, Epstein’s focus is on Marvin, but he still breaks down the film itself and offers some stories about the production. He’s a little awkward and gets lost in a few places, but he still offers some unique perspectives thanks to his inside track with the participants.
The second commentary pairs the Dynamic Duo of filmmaker Steve Mitchell and Mondo Digital’s Nathanial Thompson. They describe Prime Cut a not really being neo-noir as much as it’s kind of a midwestern western in structure, but far more subversive. They may not have written a biography on Marvin, but they spend plenty of time talking about him, which proves the unavoidable magnetic pull that Marvin had. (They do quote from Epstein at one point, so there’s a little synchronicity here.) They read a NSFW quote from Marvin regarding his feelings about the film and working for Michael Ritchie, but they’re actually far more sympathetic to the director. Ritchie made the film because he wanted to do a slam-bang action movie, but Mitchell and Thompson feel that his social criticism still shines though—they call him a A-list Larry Cohen. Despite being experienced commenters, the duo falls into the standard trap of saying that they hope people watch the movie before listening to their track, but that minor slip aside, they still offer plenty of insights into the film.
There aren’t any extra missing from previous releases, for the simple reason that Prime Cut never had any real extras on previous releases. It’s not a film that’s gotten much love on home video in the past, but here it is in all its 4K glory, with two new commentary tracks to support it. Kino Lorber continues to a fantastic job of giving these kinds of films the 4K love that they deserve.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).