Meat is the metaphor, approved previously by Eisenstein and subsequently by Wiseman: Gangsters are thrown into the sausage grinder, nymphettes are doped up and kept in sow pens. The grinning rural despot (Gene Hackman) lords over Kansas City, beef factory up front and drugs and prostitution in the back ("Something up the arm, something to lick around the belly"). He's been neglecting his debts with a Chicago crime clan, the enforcer (Lee Marvin) sent to collect gets a pitchfork stuck to the side of his car. "Country hospitality. Shit!" Michael Ritchie's direction is a svelte balancing act, a cool eye on the absurdities of a severed foot on the abattoir conveyor belt or the baby-faced henchman's farewell kiss to Mom. Marvin crashes Hackman's hamburger fête and scoops up Sissy Spacek, one of the local orphans kept naked and for sale in the hay. "I Dream of Jeannie" scores the city-slicker's gala dinner with the waif in her transparent gown, "When the Saints Go Marching In" underlines hog contents and turkey shoots at the fair, viewed by the protagonist like an astronaut surveying an alien planet. The easeful surrealism gives the Ritchie deadpan a workout—a cow-shaped fountain bleeds milk when shot-gunned, a malevolent wheat harvester gobbles up a limo and spits out a metallic cube (cf. Stravinsky's bread-machine in The Rake's Progress). Gangster movie conventions (or are they heartland values?) contemplated in the new decade, "pig grease and fat and slop." An enchantingly perverse fairy-tale that builds toward a sunflower meadow from Van Gogh, and the image of machismo reduced to a psychotically stabbing wiener. With Angel Tompkins, Gregory Walcott, Janit Baldwin, and Bill Morey.
--- Fernando F. Croce |