Grade: C+
Synopsis: A pulp writer (Michael Caine) finds himself involved in a real-life mystery when a reclusive actor (Mickey Rooney) with rumored mob-ties recruits him to ghostwrite his autobiography.
Pulp marked the reunion of writer/director Mike Hodges and star Michael Caine, who had previously made the fantastic Get Carter (1971). This time around, rather than revisit the gangster-pulp genre, they satirize it, creating a film that plays like an in-joke tinged with resentment.
It’s almost as if, after Get Carter, Hodges began to resent his own success and the pressures that came with it. Thus, you can almost see how the idea for Pulp came to be more and more appealing. Instead of the dreary industrial townscapes of England, he’d showcase the sunny locales of Malta. Instead of a cold-blooded hood, his protagonist would faint at the sight of his own blood. And along the way, he’d ridicule all of the genre’s conventions.
Yet, somehow, the film kinda-sorta works. The gags, while not laugh aloud funny, are never really in your face either. This is the kind of film you chuckle along with, and one that, had Hodges been able to get James Cagney out of retirement for Mickey Rooney’s role, might have been even better.
Pulp is the kind of film that you want to see again, to catch all the things you missed, except, in watching it again, you can’t find what you missed. You feel like there’s something there, and that, perhaps, is Hodges best gag of all.
