The Beefalo Special

Largely forgotten today, Prime Cut still stands as a classic of maverick action cinema. A recent DVD release on the comparatively obscure CBS Video imprint makes it readily available again for mass consumption. The title credits deliver scenes more darkly ironic & unsettling than most flicks of the era that I can recall. Syrupy, strings-heavy Mantovani-style music plays as the camera takes a roving tour of a slaughterhouse, fixating on various clues that cows aren’t the only animals being ground up into patties: bare ass cheeks here, an errant watch & shoe there. The foreman halts the hotdog assembly line to prep a special order, wrapping up the now link-sized human remains and shipping them off to a Chicago P.O. Box destination. Another bag man bites the dust.

The plot is a basic cat & mouse conflict much like the The Driver, but like all good crime yarns the roles are continually reversing. In this corner, Lee Marvin as an aging, but still badass bag man; a decent guy at the core whose chosen a dirty business. Adjacent, Gene Hackman as an AWOL capo who’s set up shop in Kansas City using his family’s butcher business as a front for various vice and criminal activities. Marvin’s sent to collect the $500K owed in back taxes by any means necessary, a small crew of goons in tow on the red eye drive down to the boonies.

Mirroring the emblematic and recurring cattle, everyone has a rubicund salubrity to their countenance. There’s Marvin’s Nick Devlin, with his pink pug-nosed Irish face and hanging Bogart jowls under a dome of tightly-cropped silvery-white hair. Hackman hams it up as Mary Ann, the bumpkin capo sociopath, a frizzy thinning mop combed back above penetrating blue eyes. Gregory Walcott plays his slaughterhouse foreman/sibling Weenie, a dim-witted brute of a guy with a weakness for sweat-stained wife beaters and a habit of munching on freshly-minted beef franks. Presaging Jodi Foster’s cue, Sissy Spacek makes her studio film debut as Poppy, a teenage sex slave. She’s beautiful in that willowy off-beat 70s actress kind of way, her limpid saucer eyes and finely-freckled skin reflecting a dewy innocence completely at odds with her surroundings. The flick’s themes of misogyny and chauvinism are unusually strong and she handles several scenes that would make most actresses cringe or blush with aplomb.

Ritchie pays attention to the little details to flesh things out in place of traditional plot devices. Early on there’s an altercation between a car-borne Dixieland combo and a gangster’s limo. Where the hoisted middle finger affront from the former party would normally result in an assault or killing, here it only registers a diffident honk in return. Evidence as strong as any that the gang’s Chicago clout has eroded and all is not well with the mob. Another scene centers on the filthiest of the scumbag hotels, the grime and moral decay so pervasive that it’s hard to believe it’s a set and that the occupants are actors. Marvin moves purposely through the environment, pausing to wrinkle his nose at the human feculence and take in the establishment’s sign listing services from the premium (30 cents = bed & hot bath), to the budget & penciled-in (15 cents = sit & lean).

The script is often (intentionally) hilarious in its thrice-boiled dialogue. A couple of choice bon mots:

“You eat guts.”
“Yeah, I like ‘em.”

“Too bad Weenie, that’s you’re hot dog hand. You tell Mary Ann that I’m here, and not to get any fancy ideas about turning me or my boys into hamburger. You got it?”

“Cowflesh, girlflesh, it’s all the same to me. What they’re buyin’, I’m sellin’.”

There’s no shortage of violence either. The script earns it’s “R” rating in a series of surreal scenes that play like parodies of other more serious gangster sagas. In one, Marvin and Spacek are chased through a picaresque wheat field by a steel teeth-gnashing thresher, a novel spin on the traditional hunter-prey pursuit. In another, a bloody shootout ensues against the otherwise placid backdrop of a sunflower crop. The music, by Lalo Schifrin, is well scored with each scene and cinematographer Gene Polito devises some memorably inventive long shots.

Transfers are less than ideal with some of the segments, especially night sequences, slightly washed out by print etiolation. But the visuals are never less than watchable and sound is more than decent. Not quite on par with peers like Charlie Varrick and Get Carter this flick still crams plenty of nihilistic fun into a taut, often loony 90-minutes.