One of my favourite lines in Reservoir Dogs is when Mr Blonde is sizing up Mr white:

Boy that was really exciting. I bet you’re a big Lee Marvin fan aren’t ya. Yeah me too. I love that guy.

Last night I watched Prime Cut and now I’m pretty sure that Garth Ennis is a Lee Marvin fan too. This is pretty much a must for Preacher and Punisher fans. At one point a meat obsessed bad guy becomes so enraged with Marvin that he tries to stab him with a sausage:

Prime Cut

Marvin plays a Chicago mob enforcer sent to sort out Gene Hackman, a Kansas rancher and mob affiliate who has decided to go solo. Five things that you need to know about Hackman’s character:

  • His name is Mary Ann.
  • He eats cow guts while selling young girls supplied by the local orphange. He keeps the girls in a greenhouse, but displays them from time to time, naked in sheep pens.
  • He enjoys rough-housing with his brother and only stops when his balls get squeezed.
  • He takes children’s pets from the county fair and turns them into beef burgers.
  • He sends back Chicago gangsters only when they’ve been processed into strings of sausage meat.

    • He also gets lines like this:

    You and Jake, you think you’re big men. Walk in anywhere, you take down your pants I’ll take down mine, we’ll see who’s the biggest man.

    Lee Marvin gets a machine gun, a bunch of Irish American sidekicks (Shay, Delaney, Shaughnessy & O’Brien) and Sissy Spacek:

    They really don’t make ‘em like this anymore. I first saw this when I was a kid and apparently young enough to have blanked out all memory of the naked girls, but I distinctly remembered the scene where a combine harvester eats Marvin’s Cadilac.

    Go figure.