Prime Cut - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Filmmaker Michael Ritchie was far from your common studio hand. He often made films with a heaping dose of satire, choosing to laugh at the absurdity of American culture and its obsession with populism. You see it clearly in Smile, his 1975 film about a beauty pageant that’s laced with cultural arsenic. He brought all of this and more to Prime Cut, an absolute gem of a crime genre thriller from 1972. Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman were both huge at the time, but how did they get tied to a movie that would rather eschew the violence of meat packing and production with sex slavery than your normal crime thriller? In Ritchie’s world, everything plays out almost like a fantasy. It’s not exactly reality we’re situated in, as everyone is more caricature than an actual living, breathing characters, but it’s the slick, sleazy thrills cut against two powerhouse performances that keep people engaged.

Nick (Lee Marvin) is a surly Chicago mob enforcer tasked with bringing down Mary Ann (Gene Hackman), the crooked operator of a Kansas slaughterhouse who owes a ton of money to Nick’s employers. And to make things even more messed up, Mary Ann is drugging and selling young women into sex slavery like he would do with cattle. Nick learns of this and absconds with Poppy (Sissy Spacek) as collateral until Mary Ann can come up with the money he owes. But when Nick and Poppy go to the town fair the next day to collect the money, they’re ambushed and have to flee.

Prime Cut is a perfect example of a crime thriller that refuses to give you things simply. All the normal genre movements are fussed with to make it more sleazy, despairing and comical. Images of a barn full of drugged-up women and the leering men bidding for their bodies hit harder than any of the genre thrills, although the final shootout between Mary Ann and Nick has a hilarious gag where Mary Ann’s brother, Weenie (Gregory Walcott), ties to stab Nick with a sausage as he slowly bleeds to death. Meat is murder, right?

The film is also broken up into several set pieces, including the sex slavery barn, a chase sequence involving a combine harvester, and a couple of love scenes to further explore Nick’s deeper connection to his job. It’s not the kind of sturdy genre movie that cuts easily from one incident to the next, it even revels in just how absurd and giant the impact of its caricatures and images can create. And shot in glorious Panavision with those gorgeous picaresque landscapes, Ritchie's weird ideas are given a huge gorgeous stage.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-rays
I don’t know about you, old cowpoke, but Prime Cut is sure to get genre fans excited in 4K Ultra HD with a two-disc release that comes with a BD100 for the 4K disc and a BD50 for the standard Blu-ray. Both discs are housed in a standard black amaray case, plus an o-card slipcover with the same art goes over the case. Both discs boot up to standard menu screens with options to play the film, set up audio and video, as well as browse bonus features.

As mentioned previously, Prime Cut was shot in glorious Panavision and on 35mm, which makes it a prime cut (heh) for a brand-new 4K Ultra HD presentation. That’s why it’s my great pleasure to report that the new 2160p presentation aided by Dolby Vision blows the doors off the old 2015 Blu-ray from Kino Lorber. This new presentation is sourced from a 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative, and there’s not much optical work going on to negatively affect detail and grain, thus this presentation is frequently gorgeous. All those beautiful rolling Kansas fields, 70s-era pastels in the costume design and genuinely disgusting violence are rendered incredibly well by the HEVC encode, which hovers between 80-100 mbps for the majority of the presentation. Darker scenes gain a boost in black levels and you can easily discern detail in them when comparing to the previous 2015 Blu-ray. That thick film grain is resolved very well, to boot. This new master came from Paramount and it’s clearly some terrific work by their restoration house.

We’re provided with a 5.1 surround sound and 2.0 stereo track for this new 4K Blu-ray release of Prime Cut. Both tracks are presented using the DTS-HD MA codec, although I spent the majority of the film listening to the stereo track just because of the better balance between dialogue and music. The surround track reserves the rear channels for infrequent score cues and some stray gunshots, but the surround channels aren’t engaged all that much to begin with. Source seems to be in terrific condition with no damage to note. 

As for supplements, Kino Lorber has added two commentary tracks to improve upon their 2015 Blu-ray. The commentary by Nathaniel Thompson and Steve Mitchell is packed with information on Lee Marvin’s career and Michael Ritchie’s penchant for satire, while the commentary by Lee Marvin biographer Dwayne Epstein focuses solely on Marvin’s on-set behavior at the time. Both tracks are terrific and provide plenty of things to reflect on as you’re watching the film.

4K Dics

• Audio commentary by Lee Marvin biographer Dwayne Epstein
• Audio commentary by film historians Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson

Blu-ray Disc

• Audio commentary by Lee Marvin biographer Dwayne Epstein
• Audio commentary by film historians Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson
• Trailer (HD 2:32)

There’s murder in that meat in Prime Cut, Michael Ritchie’s 1972 crime thriller that’s now been graced with a truly stellar 4K Ultra HD presentation from the folks at Kino Lorber Studio Classics. The new 2160p presentation is nice, filmlike and aided by Dolby Vision HDR, plus two new commentary tracks are presented here to deepen your love of this genre oddity. This release comes easily Recommended.