"PULP" (1972)

Starring

Michael Caine

Mickey Rooney

Lionel Stander

Lizabeth Scott

Nadia Cassini

Directed by Mike Hodges

92 minutes

What starts out ostensibly as a comic crime thriller rather loses its way around the halfway point and becomes a bit too serious, with the jokes suddenly drying up, and the plot coming to the fore. Unfortunately, and this might just be me being a thicko, but I didn’t have a clue what was going on once an hour had gone by, and without the laughs to guide me I rather floundered, and came to the conclusion that there was a lot of wasted potential here.

Michael Caine is a writer of cheap crime novels, under various pseudonyms, who isn’t getting very far with his career. Finding himself mysteriously trailed by a random bloke, in a plot thread that as far as I could see went nowhere and was mysteriously forgotten, Caine winds up accepting a job of ghostwriting an autobiography for ageing movie star / mob boss type person, Mickey Rooney. After spending an inordinate amount of time finding Rooney himself, involving sodding around on a package tour and discovering a fellow holidaymaker’s transvestite tendencies, Caine finally gets down to business. Or rather, he doesn’t, as once having found Rooney he has dinner with him at the anniversary of his father’s death, and then decides he wants no part in this autobiographical madness as it might be a bit dangerous. Having thusly wasted a week or so of his life, Caine escapes a shooting that sees some innocent musicians get it in the neck, and winds up solving the murder of the very chap he travelled all the way around Malta to see…

It’s not that "Pulp" isn’t entertaining – it is, at least for the first hour or so. The whole film is narrated in Michael Caine’s impeccably dry manner, and there’s quite a few good laughs to be had in his underplaying of ludicrous events, or his deliberate lying to make himself look good. There’s also some hilarious taxi shenanigans in the first five or ten minutes, with doors being ripped off and the like, and on the whole, it all goes rather well. Caine gets some totty, as he always does, and then wanders around various Maltese locations talking to people, making wry comments and generally being a classy gent. However, as I said, the plot begins to take over about half way through, roughly at the time that Michael finally gets in contact with Mickey Rooney, who appears to have led Caine on a long and pointless trek around Malta for a bit of a laugh. No, really, that’s the only rationale we’re actually given by Caine and awfully-sexy-but-I’ve-never-heard-of-her-and-I’m-certain-other-people-have Nadia Cassini, who turns up under orders from Rooney to basically give Caine a kick up the backside. And some sex. Later on.

Just to go off on a tangent here, but isn’t Michael Caine one of the most infuriating gentlemen to grace films? I haven’t seen many of his films – "The Italian Job" is the only other one of his that I’ve seen recently – but he always seems to wander around, with seemingly little charisma, talking… a little bit… like that… like… and he always gets all the girls no matter what the situation. Here he just walks into a typist’s office, wanders up to her and helps himself to a bit of tonsil tickling, and later on in the film he has Nadia Cassini immediately fancying a bit of snogging having spent all of four seconds in his company. And despite having all these leggy beautifuls chucking themselves at him, thereby causing jealousy in every heterosexual male in the audience, we can’t hate him for it. Because it’s Michael Caine, and he’s just so damn swish and class and top notch. I mean, it’s Michael bloody Caine. How can you compete with him? He’s just a smashing bloke. Blast him.

Anyway, now that I’ve got that out of me system, back to the plot at hand. Or lack of it. In fact I can’t say too much more about it for fear of unleashing a veritable hoard of spoilers onto your screens… though I doubt I could do that as I completely lost track of what was happening and so wouldn’t be able to tell you anyway. I’m not really totally certain as to what Caine was hoping to achieve towards the end, as his initial brief had been scuppered by an important chap’s untimely death, and he just seemed to be investigating it for want of something to do. I even wondered exactly why Caine was so keen to get involved, because as far as I knew he was meant to be an author, not an underworld associate. However, investigate he did, and I’m sure he found out what he wanted to know by the end of it. Something to do with photos and driving a truck around a beach from what I could make out.

Readers who know me might by now be wondering why on Earth I bought this film, as crime thrillers obviously aren’t my thing – this is after all the sort of film where characters say "and all that sh*t," with increasing regularity, and make jokes about illegitimacy. I’m afraid this film was bought on the strength of a Dennis Price cameo in my recent task of trying to acquire every DVD currently available with him in it. Well, I looked the film up on IMDB and the whole "Michael Caine does spoof crime comedy," aspect appealed to me so I sort of bought it for mixed reasons. But anyway. Yup, top notch "tragic" actor Dennis Price appears in a sixth billing part for two speaking scenes and some nervous looks. And a nice hat. Playing a character billed only as "Mysterious Englishman" on IMDB, he plays a chap seen around during the earlier holiday scenes, who Caine has a chat with about Lewis Carroll, swapping quotations from "Alice Through the Looking Glass" (which Price’s character is about to read for the 118^th time). And Caine eventually suspects him of possible murder, until he simply forgets about him and Price walks off to enjoy the rest of his holiday. Though not a long appearance, Price steals the film in his first scene sat at a dining table, in which he’s heckled by some Texans for not being the true vegetarian that he purports himself to be. Having confused them with a Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee quotation on logic, his weary "Piss off," is a joy to behold, serving as the only time in which I’ve yet seen the actor swear in a film. And, unlike Terry-Thomas, he somehow gets away with it using that terribly dry and ruffled manner of his. Though I somehow can’t see Caine, looking snazzy in his white suit and purple shades throughout, being a reader of the mighty Lewis Carroll – but seeing him quoting from it is worth the price of admission alone. A shame though that Price’s last appearance is silent and upside down on a grainy film recording.

The rest of the cast are fair, with none really standing out for me apart from Nadia Cassini, which was for all the wrong reasons (mmm, legs). Mickey Rooney has a vaguely infectious quality which veers between being bewildering and all out irritating, and Lionel Stander shoots a projector-operator. I think. Which probably counts for something. And the direction is rather top notch for most of it, picking up a lot of pace even when nothing seems to be happening. There are a few stretches, however, where the camera seems to be lingering on events that serve little purpose at all, such as numerous street parades and a strange bit which seems to have the Ku Klux Clan.

Though a meandering plotline and a lack of jokes towards the end of the feature hold it back from being as good as it probably could have been, "Pulp" is by no means a disaster and remains a rather pleasing diversion depending on how much you like Michael Caine.

Score out of Ten