Freida
Pinto in Blunt Force Trauma (2015, 720p)
Sissy
Spacek in Prime Cut (1972, 1080hd)
As the opening credits roll, there is a long
prologue which demonstrates the entire process of making
sausage, starting with a parade of live cows, proceeding
until the meat is stuffed inside the sausage casings.
During that industrial sequence, there is a moment of
surrealism - a human shoe on one of the assembly lines,
casually ignored by a mechanical process untended by
humans. What does it all mean? Be patient.
The film begins in earnest with a tough guy named Nick
(Lee Marvin) trying to enjoy a quiet drink in a Chicago
watering hole. He is approached by a colleague. From
their conversation we can deduce that a Kansas City
mobster owes the long green, some five hundred large, to
the Irish division of the Chicago mob. The Chicago boys
had previously sent some of their men in to collect the
accounts, but those men were killed, processed in meat
grinders, and sent back to Chicago as sausages. Aha! Now
we understand the shoe in the meat-packing plant. At any
rate, the time has obviously come to call on the
greatest mob enforcer of them all - Nick the Mick. A
reluctant Nick takes the job because the pay is sweet
and because he already has a personal score to settle
with the Kansas City guy (Gene Hackman). Something about
a girlfriend. Isn't it always?
That scene in the bar goes on much too long, but
compared to the rest of this movie, it seems as hectic
as the intro to Roger Rabbit.
In order to take on the Kansas City boys, the Chicago
mobsters can't just hop on a plane with their tommy
guns, so they crowd into a black limo and drive to
Missouri - in real time. Or at least it seems like it.
We see fields of waving wheat, highway signs that say
"Kansas City", and more wheat. This is truly one of the
great wheat-oriented films. Then the director takes a
bold step to break the beige monotony of wheat. We see
some fields of sunflowers! Whoa! My heart nearly skipped
a beat at the excitement. Then we look out the window of
the limo into the nighttime city skyline - of St
Louis. Oh, hell, still only in St Louis? Are we almost
there yet?
They do finally get out of the car, but things don't
speed up much. The rest of the movie basically consists
of shoot-outs in barns, shoot-outs in wheat fields,
shoot-outs at county fairs, and shoot-outs in sunflower
fields. All of those shoot-outs pitted Lee Marvin and
his fellow Chicago mobsters against a bunch of
rifle-totin', tow-headed farm boys in overalls. I wish
to God I was making this up, but that's really what
happened.
The early 70s represented a time of great
experimentation in filmmaking. The smell of cultural
revolution was in the air to begin with, and an
anti-establishment atmosphere pervaded the film
business, which always seems to act as a barometer of
the country's changing attitudes. The general climate of
anti-authoritarianism was magnified by a parallel
development in the American film industry. The
restrictive Hayes Code, a set of rules and regulations
regarding the portrayal of sex and violence on film, had
been replaced by version 1.0 of the MPAA rating system.
The old proscriptions had been lifted and almost any
kind of content was fair game as long as it was properly
labeled. As in any period marking the end of a long
suppression, people were keen on exercising the freedom
just because it was suddenly there, after having been
pent-up for more than three decades. Although
superficially a mobster film, Prime Cut provided the
basics required by the new cultural standards: it
provided plenty of violence, plenty of female flesh, and
plenty of thumbed noses to the establishment.
Since Prime Cut is filled with daring ideas, you can
assume that some of them worked. Law of averages. The
film has some interesting aspects:
There is some visual imagination. Sissy Spacek (in her
first credited role) literally runs away from the reaper
- no, not the Grim Reaper, but the McCormick
Reaper. Just she is about to be overtaken by a
gigantic combine in a wheat field, the other Chicago
mobsters show up and ram their black limo into the
reaper, thus disabling the gigantic machine. The scenes
in wide-open fields are stunning in the panoramic
expanse of their scope. These scenes have never seemed
very impressive on video tape, with a claustrophobic 4:3
aspect ratio, but the DVD presents the film in its
original 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and that allows the
impressive cinematography to strut its stuff, displaying
the beautiful choreography between the combine, the
limo, and the pedestrians as they maneuver around the
wheat field. Shot from eye level, the limo can barely be
seen as it barrels through the wheat, a shark fin barely
visible above water. Shot from a higher altitude, the
limo leaves a clear trail of damaged stalks behind it.
There are some wild ideas. Hackman runs some kind of
meat business as a legitimate front for his drugs and
prostitution racket. The most creative idea in the film
is that he runs a very different kind of prostitution
operation, one based on the same principles as his meat
business. He kidnaps orphaned girls, raises them in
seclusion from male companionship, then auctions them
off as virginal slaves when they reach an appropriate
level of development. Prior to the auction, he displays
the girls stark naked in pens, as if they were pigs or
cattle.
Such subtlety! A reaper coming for your life! People
with the corporate mentality who can't distinguish
between people and animals! If the symbolism were any
more obvious, there would be a train entering a tunnel
before every sex scene.
By the way, that wily profiteer Gene Hackman had to be
running the world's stupidest racket. He was selling his
human female livestock for $20,000 per head. Given the
details of his plan, he ain't gonna make money at that
price!
First of all, figure out the cost of raising a child for
sixteen years, even if you maintain her in the squalor
of Dickensian orphanhood. Including food, clothing,
shelter, and medical care, it is not possible to raise a
child for less than $3 day in 1972 dollars (that's the
year in which Hackman sold them for $20,000). Plus, it
would actually cost Hackman's racket more to raise a kid
than it would cost you or me, because we can claim our
kids as tax deductions, while he has to keep them off
the books, and must pay their medical costs out of his
pocket with no ability to add those charges as itemized
deductions. At $3 per day over sixteen years, that's
$17,000 per girl.
But even that sort of calculation assumes that
Hackman raises the girls personally, and can watch them
24 hours a day, which of course he does not and cannot
do. He has to pay his staff. To watch the girls 24 hours
per day, he must cover 168 hours per week and give time
off for sickness and vacation, so Hackman will require
five full time employees. In 1972 that would have cost
him no less than $8,000 per employee per year - total
cost $40,000 per year. Yet he only had about a dozen
girls being raised in his private orphanage - an average
cost of $3,333 per girl per year. Over 16 years, that's
$53,000 per girl.
Adding those factors together, the cost would have to be
about $70,000 per girl, but those calculations exclude
inflation and the cost of money. Let's not be too
technical and call the cost $75,000 per girl.
So Hackman is going to spend $75,000 raising a girl, and
will then sell her for $20,000. Genius! Of course what
he loses on margin he makes up in volume.
Think about one more thing. Where, exactly are a bunch
of Kansas City cowboys going to keep their sex slaves?
The film would like to be anti-corporate, but as I
recall from my college days in the late sixties, those
anti-corporate revolutionary types never seemed to take
any classes in math or finance, and that shows in this
script. Why is it that those who spew bilious rhetoric
against the ruthless corporations never seem to be able
to go through the mental discipline which is actually
necessary to be ruthlessly effective? Whatever happened
to "know thy enemy"?
Let's take it one step further, just for fun.
Hypothetically, given those costs and that volume, what
would be a realistic price for a human slave raised from
early childhood? (According to the story, the girls had
never even met any men, so they had to be cloistered
from the time they were toddlers.)
Well, mobsters aren't going to fool around with a
business that has a 20% gross profit margin. Why take
the risk of criminal punishment for a lower margin than
they could make honestly by running a freakin'
supermarket? In fact, the Hackman Plan isn't even a good
racket of he can raise the children for free!! He only
seems to "graduate" one or two per year. That's a hell
of a lot of trouble for $40,000 per annum! Real mobsters
would want at least 60% gross profit, so if they spent
$75,000 per girl, they would have needed to clear about
$190,000 in 1972. Two girls per year would net them a
quarter of a million bucks in 1972 dollars - maybe a
million in today's dollars. Now it's starting to be
worth it! If you ran the same scheme today, the
equivalent minimum price tag would be about a million
bucks. In that price range, Hackman would not be able to
sell the girls on public auction in Missouri, as
pictured in this film. The Kansas City cowboys pictured
here aren't going to be able to pony up a million bucks
(today's equivalent) for a sex slave. The only way to
make the whole Hackman scheme work would be to get
contractual advance commitments from billionaires,
because the ultra-rich are the only people who can
afford to own human slaves raised from early childhood
in a developed country. Indeed, even if the slaves were
given out as gifts, only the super-rich could afford the
kind of massive self-contained real estate holdings
necessary to keep such slaves a secret from the
authorities. Since Hackman only seems to have a couple
of girls per year come of age, even selling them for a
million bucks apiece hardly seems worth the time and
trouble to run his scheme. Since a million dollars is
small change for a billionaire, I expect that Hackman's
price per girl would actually be far, far higher than
that, assuming a demand greater than his supply.
If I were to re-write this film for a remake, I would
have Hackman fulfilling advance orders from rich oil
sheiks, or auctioning the women off to the ultra-rich in
an elegant setting. Given the latter premise, the
Hackman character shown in the original film would
really have to work on his marketing skills, because the
way he presented the "products" in the original movie,
keeping the girls on straw beds in livestock pens, would
not impress people who spend tens of thousands on their
wrist watches and expect every detail of their lives to
be exquisite.
At any rate, that's enough digressions!
Now that I think about it, my fanciful proposal for a
remake is not such a bad idea. This film meets the basic
qualifications for a sensible remake project: pretty
good movie that could have been great, interesting core
of ideas that can be easily updated. On the other hand,
those same criteria applied to Rollerball, and look how
that turned out.
At any rate, the bottom line on the existing version of
Prime Cut is that it is a very slow-paced and obvious
film, and the whole human slavery angle is totally
illogical, but the film has two classic macho stars, and
some beautiful grains of wheat hidden among the chaff.
Mr. Skin took some captures of a new transfer
of Emmanuelle (1974), and they look better than anything
we had before.
As you probably know, the film consists of soft core
erotica, loosely based on the diaries of Emmanelle
Arsan, allegedly the bored non-working wife of a
diplomat who was assigned to Thailand, got laid, and
wrote about it. (The diaries were actually written by
the husband. Story
here.) It was the mother of a series, or more
appropriately "several series," of Emmanuelle films, all
of which used a basic formula consisting of beautiful
exotic locations and sex scenes.
Some of the later films, Emmanuelle 2 for example,
represent reasonably titillating erotica. The original
does not. Some of you older guys may remember this film
fondly, but you won't get anything out of it unless you
can remember the context in which it first appeared. You
really don't want to see this film unless you saw it
back in the seventies and are nostalgic for the era.
There was a time when this babbling about sexual
liberation seemed profound and original, and the
prevailing attitude of the time could somehow overlook a
casual attitude toward rape.
So many problems:
1. In the English dubbed version, the acting is only
slightly worse than the acting in the Scooby-Doo
cartoons. It is actually good for a lot of laughs.
2. I can't decide whether the author is retarded or just
insane. One thing is clear. He must have been
institutionalized all of his life before writing this
script, and never met any women. He just heard about
them and imagined what they would be like. He has no
idea how women talk to each other, and his conception of
a woman's libido is a simplistic male masturbatory
fantasy. It goes like this: only by getting sodomized by
every member of the Taliban and forcibly raped by some
Stone Age tribesmen can Emmanuelle truly learn the
meaning of love.
And ol' Emmanuelle herself just soaks up all this
wisdom. She's even taking notes during all this
pseudo-intellectual sexual liberation cant. Of course,
the point of this was that men should take their wives
and girlfriends to the film hoping that their dates
would fall for the pitch that happiness comes from
yielding to any experience and becoming increasingly
bolder in the sack.
This IMDb comment sums up how intelligent modern women
really perceive the film:
"I can't imagine anyone finding this film
erotic. The two rape scenes are heinous. And the idea
that Emmanuelle's husband entrusts her to some
self-centered, egotistical idiot spouting
pseudo-philosophical BS about love and such, only to
have her humiliated by being sexually taken by the
winner of a boxing match in front of others is
absolutely disgusting. I couldn't feel empathy for any
of the characters in this sleazy film. The husband is
an absolute fool. Mario, the old man to whom
Emmanuelle is entrusted, is disgusting. Emmanuelle
herself is far too confused to know what she wants and
so is at the whim of everyone around her. She doesn't
become "a woman" by film's end, as she declares, but a
soulless sex machine who engages in sex purely to
satisfy animalistic passions. Nothing loving, sensual,
or enticing about this film. If couples watched this
today, I could imagine the women beating the crap out
of their male partners if they imagined they got off
to the rape, abuse, powerlessness, and humiliation of
women."
3. There essentially is no story, given that everything
in the film is just a setup for the next sex scene.
4. The dialogue consists largely of extremely dull,
pretentious, pseudo-enlightened blather about free love.
5. The video transfer on the DVD may have been the worst
in the history of DVD's. In fact, it may be the worst in
the history of images. There are cave drawings of bison
which are in far better focus. Most scenes are
uncontrasted, blurry, color-faded, green, and dark.
The film has some historical significance as one of the
first sex films to play in the occasional suburban
theater. There is some beautiful cinematography,
although it appears to have been shot on cheap film
stock. If there were a transfer mastered from a pristine
negative, this would be a visually superlative film for
its genre. The women are photographed with soft
elegance, and the landscapes are composed beautifully.
It may include the best photographic composition in the
history of porno flicks. Unfortunately, all of that is
purely hypothetical, because the DVD print looks like it
was rinsed in something the color of green baby poop.
(The HD captures below seem better than the DVD I whined
about.)
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