Ground Round

By J.C.

PRIME CUT

Directed by MICHAEL RITCHIE Screenplay by ROBERT DILLON

Everything is indeed up to date in Kansas City. They manage to offer a technique of slaughter there that is novel even for this age of mayhem. The boys at the meat-packing plant resent the intrusion of the boss's agent from Chicago, so they send him through the grinder, pack him up and ship him back home as a string of wieners.

The boss (Eddie Egan, late of The French Connection) takes this as an affront. Besides, the Kansas City boys are skimming off a healthy slice of the corporate profits. So he dispatches Nick Devlin (Lee Marvin) to teach Kansas City a little respect.

The people to see in Kansas City are Mary Ann (Gene Hackman) and his sultry wife Clarabelle (Angel Tompkins), a former Chicago model. Mary Ann auctions cattle and keeps the buyers happy by filling cowpens with stoned-out, naked teen-age girls, who are also up for sale. "I give this country what it wants," Mary Ann gloats. "Dope and flesh." Devlin stalks past the beef and the broads without batting an eye and confronts Mary Ann.

They then settle down to the business of beating and blasting each other's forces all over Kansas City, a process that produces a high body count but low interest. In his spare moments, Devlin squires--but does not sleep with --a spacy teen-age girl whom he has rescued from the pens of iniquity (portrayed by a young and resplendently unpromising actress named Sissy Spacek). She in turn lends him moral support as he triumphs over the forces of darkness and unhealthy meat-packing practices.

To give the film makers a break -- which is more than they give the viewer -- Prime Cut was obviously intended to be a tough, surreal gangster film in the Point Blank mold, a kind of jazzy allegory about brutality and dehumanization. Point Blank, however, had John Boorman directing Lee Marvin. Prime Cut has only Lee Marvin and a director who must have taken a very long lunch hour. Against all odds, Marvin summons up a measure of dignity. Hackman looks abashed.

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