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The interaction descends into a bloody gunfight, in full view of local law enforcement who, obviously on Mary Ann’s payroll, calmly watch the carnage without intervening, culminating in Devlin and Poppy being chased through a wheat field by a giant combine harvester, a nod to Cary Grant fleeing a crop duster in Hitchcock’s 1959 classic, North by Northwest. The pimp, who, of course, has no intention of paying back the money tries to give the enforcer a suitcase full of bloody offal (a variation of the usual bill sized pieces of blank paper typically used in crime film fake money handovers). Mary Ann’s operation is protected by blonde, almost Aryan looking young males, clad in denim dungarees, and armed with pitchforks. While the film generally avoids talking down to its rural setting, it nonetheless portrays aspects of it as a nightmare version of American gothic. But in Prime Cut his performance is leavened with deadpan humour, a constant and very palpable sense of bemusement at finding himself so out of place. Marvin imbues Devlin with a similar taciturn yet driven male energy. Devlin arranges to meet Mary Ann at a local fair the next day to collect the money owed to the Chicago mob, leaving with one of the doped-up women, Poppy, the first big screen role of a young Sissy Spacek.Ĭomparisons between Devlin and Marvin’s earlier screen incarnation of Parker in John Boorman’s 1967 classic, Point Blank, are unavoidable. What they’re buying, I’m selling,” Mary Ann tells a visibly disgusted Devlin. “Cow flesh, girl flesh, it’s all the same to me. Next, Devlin and his men visit Mary Ann’s ranch, where he is having a “cattle auction”, the cattle a euphemism for naked doped up women laying amidst hay bales in pens, being ogled by male buyers. First stop is a decrepit flop house where he beats up the individual responsible for feeding the previous debt collector into the mincing machine, Mary Ann’s brutish brother ‘Weenie’, so named because of his habit of always chewing on hot dogs.
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Devlin collects a couple of Irish hoods as backup, and with his faithful driver cum Man Friday, Shay (Bill Morey), they leave the bright lights of Chicago and drive to Missouri.Īlthough the story doesn’t directly spell it out, Kansas City is Devlin’s old stomping ground.
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Mob boss Jake (a cameo by real life former New York police detective turned character actor Eddie Egan) turns to professional enforcer, Nick Devlin, played by Lee Marvin, to retrieve the debt. The poor unfortunate who ended up as sausage links is the latest debt collector sent to retrieve half a million dollars Mary Ann owes the Chicago Irish mob. The meat processing factory belongs to Mary Ann (Gene Hackman), a Kansas City crime lord who uses the operation as a front to traffic narcotics and women. Taking the link of sausages, he wraps them in butcher paper and postmarks them to an address in Chicago. He calmly times the procedure on his wristwatch, pausing the process presumably at the point when the human meat has been made into sausage links. At some point, one of the male workers adds what is obviously a human body into the mix. To a Lalo Schifrin score, deliberately engineered to sound like calming elevator muzak, we follow a cow being slaughtered and fed into the mechanised process of creating hot dogs. Prime Cut’s at times surreal nature is signalled in the opening credits.
It would be going too far to describe it as a neglected classic, but it is a fascinating film about a divided America that, as a result, finds obvious echoes today. Want to talk about one of the strangest, if not the strangest American crime film to emerge in the first half of the 1970s? Then, let’s talk about Michael Ritchie’s neo-noir Prime Cut, as it turns fifty this year.