When people talk about the New Hollywood of the 1970s that spawned Scorsese, Coppola, Bogdanovich, and so many other singular auteurs, Michael Ritchie isn’t a name that comes up as frequently as it ought to given the consistency of his output. A sly satirist preoccupied with what it meant to be a winner and what it meant to be a loser in an America that, thanks to Vietnam, Watergate, and other crises was itself in the middle of a pretty grim losing streak, Ritchie cranked out one brilliant movie after another, most of them on the corrosive effects of competition.
Ritchie’s winning streak (artistically if not always commercially) began in 1969 with the Robert Redford ski drama “Downhill Racer.” He followed that with an unbroken string of excellent work: “Prime Cut” and “The Candidate” (another Redford vehicle) in 1972, the razor-sharp beauty pageant comedy “Smile” in 1975, the equally cynical — in spite of its superficial appearance as a kids’ movie — “The Bad News Bears” in 1976, and the romantic and charming football film “Semi-Tough” in 1977.
At first glance, “Prime Cut” might seem to be the outlier in this initial cycle; it’s the only title that doesn’t take on competition as its primary subject, and it’s the only one that could really be categorized as a genre film, a gangster movie amid a series of character-driven dramedies. It was also not as well received upon its initial release as Ritchie’s other work of the period; while it had a few fans like Roger Ebert, New York Times critic Vincent Canby spoke for the majority when he called it “as unsavory and unappetizing as a cheaper grade of packaged meat that is beginning to spoil.”
A beautiful new 4K UHD/Blu-ray edition of “Prime Cut” from Kino Lorber provides an opportunity for reappraisal, and it doesn’t take much longer than the opening credit sequence to see why an establishment toady like Canby might have been put off by the film and how dead wrong he was in his assessment. The movie begins with a funny but disturbing set piece in which we see meat being prepared and packaged in a slaughterhouse; along the way, a man is tossed in and turned into sausages.
It turns out that the man was a henchman for the Irish mob in Chicago, and like other minions who have been sent to Kansas City, Missouri to collect on a $500,000 debt, he has been murdered by a renegade pimp who refuses to pay what he owes to Chicago. The pimp, played by Gene Hackman with the unlikely character name of Mary Ann, uses his slaughterhouse not only to dispose of enemies but as a front for his real business, selling young virgins he buys from a local orphanage into sex slavery.
The basic premise of “Prime Cut,” in which Chicago sends tough guy Lee Marvin to Kansas City to collect on Hackman’s debt once and for all, is straightforward crime movie stuff, but Ritchie and screenwriter Robert Dillon use it as a springboard for an extremely idiosyncratic and prescient portrait of an America splitting apart. Marvin is very funny as a fish out of water among the rural wheat fields (there’s a witty chase scene between the hit man and a combine harvester that earns comparison with the crop dusting scene in “North by Northwest”), and Ritchie mines the city-country opposition for insights that go beyond the obvious.
In its own subtle way, “Prime Cut” is as much a film about politics in America as “The Candidate,” with Ritchie and Dillon parodying Nixon’s “silent majority” in the portrait of violence seething beneath the surface of the Midwest’s amber waves of grain. Although the dialogue in “Prime Cut” is rarely explicitly political, there’s a clue to what the filmmakers are up to in Marvin’s character’s origins in Chicago. In 1972, Chicago was still fresh in the mind as the site of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where cops brutalized protesters.
As critic Charles Taylor pointed out in his book “Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American ’70s” (an excellent primer on Ritchie and other unsung directors of the era), Nixon’s silent majority mostly felt the cops were correct to beat up on those hippie draft dodgers, and Chicago — like cities in general — was seen by middle America as a source of violence and chaos. At one point in “Prime Cut,” Hackman says that Chicago is “a sick old sow grunting for fresh cream. What it deserves is slop. Someday, they’re gonna boil that town down for fat. Here, it’s different. This is the heartland.”
The satire in “Prime Cut” comes from sending Marvin’s Chicago gangster to the heartland and showing him in far more danger from its denizens than they would be if they went to the city. Ritchie also, without forcing the metaphor, draws parallels between the silent majority’s support of the Vietnam War and the human flesh that Hackman either turns into meat or sells to the highest bidder for sexual pleasure. In one of the movie’s most effective and unpleasant scenes, Marvin walks in on an auction where Hackman has his young virgins (including one played by a young Sissy Spacek in her film debut) in pens in a barn, just like his cattle. “Cow flesh, girl flesh, it’s all the same to me,” Hackman tells Marvin. “What they’re buying, I’m selling.”
While Ritchie is happy to use Hackman as a stand-in for Nixon and to underline the hypocrisy of a character espousing all-American values while treating other human beings as grist for the slaughter, his is a surprisingly gentle form of satire, all things considered. There’s honest affection for the people of Kansas City in scenes like a local fair, where Ritchie exhibits a documentarian’s eye (he began his career in non-fiction television) and mixes local non-actors with the professionals to great effect. Scenes like the fair also exhibit the director’s effective blending of New Hollywood techniques with more classical storytelling tropes; like “Dirty Harry,” which came out a year earlier, “Prime Cut” creates an interesting bridge between the Hollywood studio system and the New Wave-inspired maverick filmmaking of a new era.
It’s also as timeless as it was timely, with the sharp divisions Ritchie and Dillon were delineating embryonic examples of the exacerbated tensions of the MAGA era. Few of the movie’s allegorical aspects were widely recognized at the time, perhaps because Ritchie’s touch was so light; his observational style makes him one of the least manipulative among his peers, and it’s probably why he’s still never fully gotten his due — although his movies of the 1970s clearly express a forceful and unique worldview.
There’s also, admittedly, a bit of inconsistency in Ritchie’s filmography after 1977, and that has perhaps diluted the memory of his strong early work. Following “Semi-Tough,” Ritchie hit a bit of a rough patch with the unfairly maligned “The Island,” an expensive thriller that slowed his momentum before he came back in the 1980s as the director of amiable comedies like “Fletch” and “The Golden Child.” Although these movies lacked the depth of Ritchie’s earlier work, in a way, his wry, distanced approach was tailor-made for the “SNL” school of detached bemusement, which Chevy Chase and Eddie Murphy displayed in their movies for Ritchie. (Among Chase’s collaborations with Ritchie was “Fletch Lives,” a far less effective standoff between city and country values than “Prime Cut.”)
Ritchie showed that he hadn’t lost his satirist’s edge, or his interest in America’s psychotic obsession with competition, in later movies like “Diggstown” and “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom,” but for the most part his best work was concentrated in the first eight years of his career. Those eight years are enough to earn Ritchie’s place in the pantheon though, and “Prime Cut” is possibly the best of his output. Its odd blend of humor, action, and unsettling glimpses into the heart of cruelty and evil — as in a scene where one of Hackman’s virgins is punished by being sold to local homeless men for a handful of nickels — is idiosyncratic even for the early 1970s, but Ritchie’s firm tonal control keeps it all coherent and effective.
His mastery of the Panavision frame is impressive as well; Ritchie isn’t commonly thought of as a visual stylist, but “Prime Cut” is as elegant in its compositions as its characters are clumsy in their brutality. For decades, the movie was available only in horribly compromised pan-and-scan editions; the widescreen Kino Lorber disc maintains the film’s proper aspect ratio and showcases it in a transfer that’s better than any other the movie has had to date. It’s a great way to revisit the work of a master director, or to discover it.
The special edition 4K UHD and Blu-ray edition of “Prime Cut” is now available from Kino Lorber.
