Post by Capo on Jan 7, 2010 15:00:46 GMT
Prime Cut
Michael Ritchie 1972 | USA
After a predecessor is sent home as sausage meat, a notorious Chicago mob enforcer (Lee Marvin) is sent to Kansas City to retrieve a debt owed by a cattle rancher (Gene Hackman).
Competent, fairly sparse genre piece scripted by the co-writer of French Connection II. It's pretty taut in that the action unfolds over the course of three days, and yet it has that rambling casualness that seemed to run through many forgotten American films of the period; this is a minor masterpiece. You've got the token 'adult' ingredients that lend a sense of sordid quality to the material: the opening credits unfold over a sequence in which a human corpse is cut down into sausage meat; there's a prostitution racket in there, and there's Sissy Spacek's brief full frontal nudity thrown in too. Its B-movie toughness is both undercut and accentuated by its black humour - a tense chase through a fĂȘte turns almost to slapstick midway through; the resulting tone is odd if intriguing. A Hitchcockian set-piece involves Marvin and Spacek trying to outrun a menacing crop-cutter; in it, an unusual and brief shot captured from behind the machine's blades as it nears its two would-be victims adds to the tension. Late on, a gun fight in a sunflower field, again well shot, has Marvin in full vigilante mode, as if to counterbalance his previously awkward attempts at romancing and rescuing Spacek from the clutches of Hackman's cowardly villain.
Michael Ritchie 1972 | USA
After a predecessor is sent home as sausage meat, a notorious Chicago mob enforcer (Lee Marvin) is sent to Kansas City to retrieve a debt owed by a cattle rancher (Gene Hackman).
Competent, fairly sparse genre piece scripted by the co-writer of French Connection II. It's pretty taut in that the action unfolds over the course of three days, and yet it has that rambling casualness that seemed to run through many forgotten American films of the period; this is a minor masterpiece. You've got the token 'adult' ingredients that lend a sense of sordid quality to the material: the opening credits unfold over a sequence in which a human corpse is cut down into sausage meat; there's a prostitution racket in there, and there's Sissy Spacek's brief full frontal nudity thrown in too. Its B-movie toughness is both undercut and accentuated by its black humour - a tense chase through a fĂȘte turns almost to slapstick midway through; the resulting tone is odd if intriguing. A Hitchcockian set-piece involves Marvin and Spacek trying to outrun a menacing crop-cutter; in it, an unusual and brief shot captured from behind the machine's blades as it nears its two would-be victims adds to the tension. Late on, a gun fight in a sunflower field, again well shot, has Marvin in full vigilante mode, as if to counterbalance his previously awkward attempts at romancing and rescuing Spacek from the clutches of Hackman's cowardly villain.