Pulp. 1972. UK. Written and directed by Mike Hodges. With Michael Caine, Mickey Rooney, Lionel Stander. 35mm courtesy Park Circus. 95 min.
After the success of Get Carter, Michael Caine reunited with writer-director Mike Hodges on this satirical sendup of John Huston’s crime movies, which features deliciously hammy performances by Mickey Rooney, Lionel Stander, Dennis Price, and Lizbeth Scott in her last role. Caine plays the hack author of cheap, titillating paperbacks who lands a suspiciously dodgy gig: ghostwriting the autobiography of a washed-up Hollywood actor, played all-too knowingly by Rooney, who’s holed up on the island of Malta with his mother, his mistress, and his gunsel bodyguard. The film manages to out-meta Pulp Fiction: “What’s delightful about Pulp,” Howard Hampton observes, “is that while it belongs in a line of irreverent, offhand noir deviations, from The Big Sleep (1946) and Don Siegel’s The Big Steal (1949) to Beat the Devil (1953) and even Jean-Luc Godard’s Samuel Fuller brush-off Made in USA (1966), it doesn’t mimic them. There are choreographed mishaps and baroque grotesqueries that wouldn’t be out of place in films by Tati or Fellini.”