Pulp Fact

Imagine, if you can, a movie written by Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove) and directed by Mel Brooks (The Producers), and you may begin to get an inkling of Mike Hodges’s 1972 madcap feature Pulp.

Throw in a couple American film noir-era actors, an array of eccentrics and an energetic Hollywood Golden Age star and the result, in the words of protagonist Mickey King (Michael Caine), makes the story ‘like some pornographic photograph: Difficult to work out who was doing what, and to whom.’

The original idea was for the three Mikes—Caine, writer/director Hodges and producer Michael Klinger—to reunite the team that made the serious 1971 British gangster film classic Get Carter for a new project in that genre.

The second time around, though, the three Mikes went for a story that is nearly impossible to classify as anything but crackpot: a fake gangster hires a fake author to write his memoir. As Ben Dinuccio (Lionel Stander), the actor’s gravelly-voiced intermediary assures the prospective author, nothing could be easier: ‘He’s got more stories than the Bible. Crazy stuff. All you got to do is write it down. Relax!’ 

Caine’s Mickey King is a louche middle-class Brit expat who dictates formula macho fantasies. A Mediterranean typing pool turns King’s dictation tapes into manuscripts that become pulp bestsellers under a half dozen names, such as My Gun Is Long by Guy Strange. King’s publisher, Miloš Marcovic (Leopoldo Trieste) is ‘a Greco-Albanian born in Budapest whose talent for writing book covers is such that even the author doesn’t recognize his own work.’ King ultimately is hired by Preston Gilbert (Mickey Rooney), a nutty, pint-sized classic Hollywood gangster movie star, to ghostwrite his memoir.

Gilbert is based loosely on Hollywood gangster film star George Raft, a club dancer who became an actor and was reputed to have ties to organized crime figures. Incidentally, Dinuccio refers to Gilbert’s mother as ‘Mrs. Stompanato’. Johnny Stompanato was the mobster boyfriend of actress Lana Turner, stabbed to death in 1958 by Turner's daughter, Cheryl Crane, in an incident ruled a homicide justified by self-defense.

Rooney has great comic timing. He has the physical presence of a vaudevillian, and the energy of five actors. His Gilbert warms up like a bantam-weight boxer in his dressing room as he prepares to meet King, shouting through a closed door. A dance he does in his tighty-whities before a series of mirrored closet doors is one of several such routines, the antics of an aging narcissist with an orange-dyed comb-over. Oh…

We first meet King through his self-conscious riff on the classic film noir voiceover, making appointed rounds in Valletta on the island of Malta. A large stranger clumsily tails him, like Bulgarians in a James Bond movie. The story is supposed to take place in Italy and started out being shot there, but Hodges said the continual payoff demands by the local mob made it necessary to move the shoot elsewhere.

The story line is that Gilbert was born in Italy and went to the US as a child, that his organized crime connection got him deported, and that he lives with his mother and a collection of eccentrics on what his right-hand man Dinuccio refers to as ‘a rich man’s Alcatraz’ in the Mediterranean. Someone is trying to kill him; the same someone possibly wants to kill King as well.

This state-of-mind Italy is a fascist country ruled by a boar-hunting generalissimo named Prince Frank Cippola (Victor Mercieca) who is running for reelection. His ambitious wife Princess Betty Cippola (Lizabeth Scott) manages his campaign. Betty also turns out to have been the third of Gilbert’s five wives. Scott, one of film noir’s great femmes fatales in her final film appearance, appears to relish camping up her role.

King, to Betty: You are my very first princess.
Betty: Am I?
King: I'll bet that was a fairy tale romance.
Betty: On the contrary, the prince was very hetero. (To Gilbert) Isn't that right, superstar?
Gilbert laughs dismissively.
King: Isn't he big in the New Front?
Betty: Yes, but he was a Christian Democrat when I met him.
King: That does make a difference.

In an interlude, Dennis Price slips in as a supercilious, Lewis Carroll-quoting vegetarian expat who has read Alice in Wonderland 117 times and plans, he tells King, ‘starting again, tomorrow’.

And the bodies start dropping.

PC warning: this is the 1970s, and the main character is the purveyor of male fantasies, so there is lots of girl furniture (and eye shadow). Liz Adams (Nadia Cassini), King’s initial contact to Gilbert, gives her then-stylish hot pants more than their due. On other hand, just as King’s ‘pornographic photograph’ comment at outset suggests that it is tough to trick out what is going on in the plot, his narration often is not in sync with what we see, making it hard to tell whether what the viewer sees is real or fantasy.

As Dinuccio sends off Gilbert: ‘Remember, thou art pulp; and to pulp thou shall return!’

Pulp 1972 U.K. (108 minutes). Written and directed by Mike Hodges; produced by Michael Klinger; music by George Martin; cinematography by Ousama Rawi; editing by John Glen.

“First Reformed”

Vladimir Nabokov complained that there is no place in art for a Western Union messenger to deliver a work’s message. In Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” there clearly is a Western Union messenger, but he knocked off work with the message undelivered in his satchel.

We begin with the Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), the pastor of a gift shop. Well, not exactly a gift shop: a 250-year-old clapboard New England legacy church rich in history, a waystation of antislavery’s Underground Railroad. Father Toller’s historic First Reformed Church is maintained under the aegis of a neighboring prosperous megachurch, Abundant Life. Father Toller has a handful of regular parishioners.



Ethan Hawke's Father Toller has no choir to preach to in "First Reformed" 

The First Reformed’s vicar is not a firebrand of the Old Time Religion or religious politics. He lost his only son in the Iraq war; his wife was a victim of collateral emotional damage. He labors in the vineyards of Thomas Merton, but he is not Mertonian. In his Spartan rectory, sustained by strong drink, Father Toller tells us that he has committed himself to setting down his daily thoughts by hand in a diary ‘for the period of twelve months—one year’. But Father Toller is less a contemplative than a deeply lonely man.

Diaries, even those of the most illustrious, tend to be dull, even if penned by someone with flair like the Madame du Barry. Father Toller’s earnest record is no exception. It would have been more telling to hear one of his sermons. A Father Mackenzie effort heard by a half-dozen—and a large cinema audience—would have given a much better insight into who this man is.

Amanda Seyfried as Mary in "First Reformed" 

And then Father Toller is faced with a Marian Problem. Perhaps this is an occupational hazard. Mary (Amanda Seyfried), a pregnant young woman who turns up after one of his services, asks Father Toller to have a word with her husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), an environmental activist. Michael does not want to bring a child into a world compromised by the depredations of corporate greed.

Father Toller’s long conversation with Michael is his most lucid moment in the film. He listens intelligently, and gives this morbidly fraught millennial the kind of loving, level-headed advice one might offer a son or nephew. Hawke handles this scene beautifully. However, it is unlikely that either Merton or Socrates, Basho or Lao Tzu would have had better success speaking with the young man.    

Mary subsequently discovers that Michael has a ‘suicide vest’ rigged with explosives. She reveals this piéce de resistance to Father Toller. Father Toller removes the item from the premises. Michael blows his head off with a shotgun on a nature trail.

Mounting evidence such as bloody urine indicates that Father Toller has health issues. We see him self-medicate with strong drink as he walks his personal Garden of Gethsemane and the church graveyard, and continues to commit his thoughts longhand to a composition book. 

Ethan Hawke as Father Ernst Toller in "First Reformed"

In the meantime, a ceremony celebrating First Reformed’s 250th anniversary is close at hand. The event will be attended by Father Toller and Abundant Life Pastor Joel Jeffers (Cedric Kyles), the town mayor, the governor of New York and Edward Balq (Michael Gaston), a local entrepreneur and megachurch contributor. Pastor Jeffers is a positive, responsible man who runs a large religious organization. Balq is a liberal Aunt Sally of everything wrong with the Trump administration and Republicanism as currently configured (MP does not contend that these are not target-rich environments).

Cedric [the Entertainer] Kyles as Pastor Jeffers in "First Reformed"

The plot thickens. Father Toller consoles the pregnant widow Mary in her time of grief. He has a confrontation with Balq. He is attacked verbally at a youth ministry group session by a young man armed with cookie-cutter conservative talk radio sound bites. He spitefully rejects the helping hand of Esther (Victoria Hill), a concerned local woman with whom he had been intimately involved. He contemplates the vest. Pastor Jeffers expresses concern at Father Toller’s visible distress, reminding him that there was more to Christ’s ministry than his dark night of the soul in Gethsemane.

MP shall say only that the dénouement misfires. The picture is beautifully cast, shot and acted, but unlike Saint Anthony, the pastor protagonist yields to temptation in his spiritual desert. The story’s superficial, unsatisfying grasp of the contemplative life suggests just how alien religious spirituality has become to materialist contemporary society.

Detail of Hieronymous Bosch's The Temptation of Saint Anthony

This story would have had the strongest, most effective impact by plumbing Merton or more pointedly Dietrich Bonhoeffer to speak truth to power in a concluding sermon. One thinks of great movie moments such as Paul Newman’s closing trial argument in The Verdict. Such a resolution would crown what could have been Hawke’s greatest role. It would have rewarded the audience for sitting through two hours of a Great Big Story and delivered a universal message that would have been remembered and quoted for many years to come.  

“First Reformed” 2017 U.S. (113 minutes). Written and directed by Paul Schrader; cinematography by Alexander Drynan; edited by Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.; casting by Susan Shopmaker.