Rating: C
Dir: Michael Ritchie.
Star: Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman, Sissy Spacek, Gregory Walcott.
This does a fair amount right. I particularly liked the setting. Organized crime is typically a very urban industry: this relocates it to the rural setting of Kansas. The only similar thing I can recall is Amish gangster Kai Proctor in the Banshee TV series. Here, the man in charge is the oddly-named Mary Ann (Hackman), who traffics in both dope and female flesh, when not running the local slaughterhouse. The mob in Chicago believe he owes them half a million, but previous efforts to collect have been unsuccessful. The last enforcer they sent, returned to Chicago wrapped in brown paper, as sausages. Time to send in the heavy hitters. Specifically, Nick Devlin (Marvin).
The mere fact he’s Lee Marvin tells you how this is going to go. Things are somewhat complicated by his former relationship with Mary Ann’s wife Clarabelle, and also Devlin’s decision to+ liberate Poppy (Spacek, in her feature debut), one of Mary Ann’s “prime cuts”. But it’s basically what you would expect. Devlin politely requests the money. Mary Ann refuses. Devlin insists. Mary Ann responds with violence. Devlin escalates. In between, we have more B-roll shot at the local county fair than is necessary; a disturbing scene where naked, drugged young women are penned up like livestock; and a chase sequence where Devlin and Poppy are hunted down by a combine harvester (top). Turns out those machines are also pretty good at chewing up cars. Even seventies ones. Who knew?
The problems are more in the number of scenes which don’t move either the plot or the characters forward. Beyond the footage of pie-eating contests, there’s the extended footage of Mary Ann wrestling with his lieutenant, the arguably more oddly-named Weenie (Walcott, who was the hero in Plan 9 From Outer Space). Said lieutenant does prove at the end, that you don’t want to bring a sausage to a gunfight. Truly advice to live by. It also opens in an extended extract, with a chirpy Lalo Schifrin score, taken from the educational film, Your Abattoir and You. Or maybe it just seems that way. Suffice it to say, this probably won’t make Morrissey’s ten best movies list. So that is a plus. However, it is not exactly subtle about drawing a parallel between dealing in human and animal flesh.
Marvin and Hackman are very good, especially when getting the chance to bounce off each other. They’re both hard men, but Mary Ann has a natural charisma which makes for a leader. He certainly seems to have no trouble recruiting henchmen who, save for Weenie, are all corn-fed, blond farm boys, who might as well be clones. Again, it’s a nice contrast to the dark Mafioso or cartel types normally seen. It just never quite gelled for me. While a tasty enough steak, it feels like there’s too much fat on it, and I was left cutting around that, in order to get to the good stuff.