Prime Cut

Prime Cut (1972) is a hard-edged crime action film you can watch online on iFILM. A Chicago syndicate sends cool, methodical enforcer Nick Devlin out to Kansas to collect a debt from a slaughterhouse boss known as Mary Ann. The last man they sent came home as a box of sausages.

Lee Marvin's Devlin walks straight into the grinder: his target deals in more than beef, keeping drugged young women penned on the farm like livestock. Gene Hackman plays Mary Ann, a fat, grinning kingpin who treats people and carcasses as roughly the same product. A seventeen-year-old Sissy Spacek makes her screen debut as one of the captives. The film stages a shotgun battle through wheat fields and a combine harvester chasing a man across open country — a sequence that got quoted for decades.

Director Michael Ritchie shaped it into a mean, satirical fable about an America where capitalism literally turns people into meat. Eighty-eight lean minutes, no padding, two great actors on opposite ends of a gun. Stream Prime Cut (1972) online on iFILM.