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.