“Prime Cut” (1972)
While “Prime Cut,” the third film directed by Michael Ritchie — the filmmaker behind such ’70s classics as “Downhill Racer” and “The Candidate,” but also “The Bad News Bears” and “Fletch” — is loved in crime film aficionado circles, it’s definitely lesser known than other films of the era. Ritchie at this point had been known for his satirical light touch on “The Candidate,” but “Prime Cut” sees him entering “Dirty Harry” and Don Siegel territory as the picture is raw, brutal and downright ugly and risque (its violence is ferocious for its day and it even has a graphic scene of naked female slaves being sold off as cattle). As surly as ever, Lee Marvin plays Devlin, a hatchet man sent from Chicago to Kansas to collect a debt from a crooked meatpacking scion played by Gene Hackman. Things get more complicated when it’s revealed that Hackman’s Mary-Ann character (yes, Mary-Ann) is involved in complex drug deals and pimping women on his farm. To exacerbate it all, it’s revealed that Devlin has had a past romantic relationship with Hackman’s perennially-naked-around-the-house wife played by Angel Tompkins. In their film debuts, Sissy Spacek and Janit Baldwin play two of the naked, drugged-up girls in the film being pimped and auctioned off to these southern heathens. If that sounds fucked up, that’s because it is. But part of the fun, if you want to call it that, is the bile and disgust that Marvin’s character has for all the sordid happenings and the godless, backwood barbarians.
“The Seven-Ups” (1973)
The only directorial effort by Philip D’Antoni, the producer of police thrillers “Bullitt” and “The French Connection,” this exec-turned-filmmaker had a thing for groundbreaking and memorable car chases in his pictures, and “The Seven-Ups” also features a ridiculously long, and pretty awesome car chase. The thrillers D’Antoni produced were gritty and documentary-like, and “The Seven-Ups,” starring the great Roy Scheider, was very much in this same milieu. Co-starring character actors Tony Lo Bianco (NBC‘s “Police Story” in the 1970s), Larry Haines (“The Odd Couple“) and Richard Lynch (known for playing villains on TV on “Starsky & Hutch,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “T. J. Hooker,” etc.), Scheider stars as a renegade NYPD investigator running a type of dirty and unorthodox task force made up of plainclothes officers charged with taking down criminals guilty of offenses and ensuring them a minimum sentence of seven years in prison upon conviction (hence the name). Lo Bianco plays Scheider’s street informant who tips them to a rash of kidnappings, only the victims are mob bosses and high level players. Things get muddled when one of the Seven-Ups gets killed in action and Scheider’s character is out for revenge. D’Antoni used “Bullitt” and ‘French Connection’ stunt coordinator and driver Bill Hickman to pull off his elaborate chase — the film’s major set piece (watch below) — and the scene was edited by the Oscar-winning Jerry Greenberg of “The French Connection” fame. Somewhat slight in the ‘70s crime oeuvre, it’s still an engaging and loose pic in this era worth tracking down.
