PRIME CUT (1972: Dir. Michael Ritchie)
By 1972 Lee Marvin was a bona fide star yet he was still choosing films where he shared equal screen time with mostly younger actors like Clint Eastwood (Paint Your Wagon) and Paul Newman (Pocket Money). Michael Ritchie's Prime Cut would break that cycle with a character tailor-made for Marvin's grey-haired cool. As Irish mob enforcer Nick Devlin, Marvin is the very definition of dressed to kill, with his snazzy ties, white leather shoes, and the burnished submachine gun in an attache case, that he keeps in his limousine. From his first appearance in a crowded bar, the viewer immediately senses that there is no-one who can touch him for style, cunning, and deadly force. His worthy foe is a rebellious Kansas City racketeer played by Gene Hackman in a grinning cornpone performance that masks a frighteningly sadistic meglomania. Theirs is a conflict that represents the historical rivalries of a corrupt America, city vs. rural, homegrown vs. immigrant, and man vs. beast, amusingly staged by Ritchie with tongue firmly in cheek. It culminates in a picturesque parody of Hitchcock's North by Northwest with Marvin, and ingenue Sissy Spacek, fleeing a predatory threshing machine across acres of gleaming Alberta-shot wheat fields, accompanied by Lalo Schifrin's Dirty Harry meets Cool Hand Luke pastiche score. Conceived by director Ritchie and writer Robert Dillon as a coldly ironic black comedy, it was reshaped by its producers with a happier ending that allowed one the rare opportunity to see Lee Marvin in the role of an unabashed knight-in-shining-armor. It is a welcome humanizing touch, that in retrospect, helped to ameliorate some of the film's seedier and disturbing moments. Whether it made any difference in box office revenues is a moot point given its middling grosses, but it certainly didn't undermine the warranted cult interest that Prime Cut enjoys to this day. DVD & BLU-RAY
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