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.
