Mike Hodges 1972 Show Business Neo-Noir Pulp is a Fascinating Mess
A fifty-something Mickey Rooney (playing a sixty-something movie star) does not show up in Mike Hodges’ 1972 comic thriller Pulp until about forty minutes in. He exits the proceedings far too quickly but in a relatively short amount of screen time the Lilliputian screen legend accomplishes the seemingly impossible feat of stealing a Michael Caine movie from Michael Caine in his prime.
It helps that Rooney was playing a role that riffed on his own crazy rollercoaster ride through show-business as well as the similarly dramatic lives of contemporaries like George Raft and Frank Sinatra, who lived the gangster life, or at least were connected to all the right/wrong people onscreen and off. Pulp gives Preston Gilbert, Rooney’s character, many of the accoutrements of Rooney’s famously rocky personal as well as his professional life, like many, many marriages (Preston is on number five) and an unlikely reputation as a womanizer.
These two characters are a study in contrasts. Mickey King, the pulp fiction writer Caine plays with effortless cool, is a dry-witted Casanova irresistible to every attractive woman he encounters. Rooney’s Preston Gilbert, meanwhile, is as high strung and desperate for attention as an agitated, needy Chihuahua.
Then there’s the even more pronounced physical contrast between these antithetical lowbrow entertainers. Caine is a tall man but compared to Rooney, he’s a giant. Director Mike Hodges, coming off Get Carter, and cinematographer Ousama Rawi use a lot of wide shots that make Rooney look less like an unusually short man than an insect-sized man-sprite.
Rooney’s role here is a glorious sustained attack on the actor’s dignity. Whether Preston is lovingly applying glue to his toupee or insisting that everyone in his presence sit down to make him feel taller, Rooney delivers a performance devoid of vanity or narcissism. Rooney’s performance transcends mere self-deprecation to arrive at something deeper, darker and more masochistic. Rooney isn’t just innocently poking fun at the gargantuan, easily pricked egos of show business celebrities like himself: he’s cathartically letting some of his own darkness bleed out.
There is a wonderful sequence where Preston decides to enact slapstick revenge on nearby diners at a restaurant by pretending to be a bumbling, comically inept waiter who keeps “accidentally” spilling things on the indignant strangers, much to their annoyance, aggravation and anger. The scene has the rhythms of an ancient vaudeville sketch, the kind of Waiter kketch Rooney undoubtedly took part in during his time as a child vaudevillian, or a sequence from a Jerry Lewis movie or silent film. But there’s an undeniable element of aggression and anger to it as well. Preston isn’t using his fame, power and talent to entertain the public; he’s using it to punish strangers for getting on his bad side. Preston can buy people and keep them around, but he cannot buy their love.
In Pulp, Preston is an impotent king of Hollywood living in his memories of the past because he senses, rightly, that he has no future. Preston’s giant mansion is a masterpiece of production design. The hilariously grandiose, enormous paintings of Preston that litter the halls of his giant home get bigger and more laughs alone than most comedies do in their entirely.
But before Pulp becomes the Mickey Rooney show, Caine, who also produced (along with Hodges) ushers us into the murky proceedings via wall-to-wall narration in classic detective movie form. Mickey is a savvy character but he also appears to be a godawful writer. That’s apparent both from the snippets of Mickey’s writing we’re treated to and his narration, which is deliberately pulpy and overwrought.
Mickey may be a genre hack but his sordid little books, written under leering pen names like S. Odomy, but his work is popular among the wrong kinds of people, as he discovers when he’s offered a small fortune for a mysterious writing project that turns out to be a gig ghost-writing the memoirs of eccentric Hollywood legend Preston Gilbert.
For both Preston Gilbert and Mickey King, art has a way of blurring with reality, although considering the populist, bloody nature of their work, it’s more accurate to say that in their lives, entertainment and real life get hopelessly mixed up.
Mickey is a prolific creator of mystery fiction who ends up living the hardboiled life he previously only wrote about while Preston has clearly spent much of his life, particularly the early years, acting like a gangster onscreen and off.
Things go murderously and violently awry almost immediately once Mickey meets Preston but even though Pulp produces the requisite quota of dead bodies and deadly intrigue, the stakes never seem particularly high. That is both a strength and a weakness. Following the zeitgeist-capturing success of Get Carter, a movie that helped define a swinging era in British pop culture, audiences and critics alike were probably looking for something different and more than a self-consciously slight little lark that doesn’t take itself, or anything else, too seriously.
The title Pulp gives the movie permission to be, well, pulp: trashy, slight, full of detective movie cliches and attitude, the cinematic equivalent of one of its hero’s lurid paperbacks. This is one of those light mysteries where the murders at the heart of the plot don’t seem particularly important. The breezy pleasures of Pulp lie in the rambling, picturesque journey, not in the destination.
Get Carter is as British as movies get but Pulp is a swampy International/European stew with a British lead and director, heavyweight American supporting players in Lionel Stander (he of the gravel voice and oxen frame) and Rooney, a bevy of beautiful birds of various ethnicities, all of whom clearly wish to shag our hero (and most assuredly not Preston) and a simultaneously picturesque and kind of depressing Mediterranean setting.
Pulp references Alice in Wonderland repeatedly, most notably in the form of a literate Englishman played by Dennis Price who trades quotes from Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece of whimsy with Mickey, but also in the film’s depiction of its hero as a paradoxically wised-up innocent like Alice who finds himself traveling through the Looking Glass (which in this case is more like a film camera) and into a casually surrealistic underworld realm of killer priests, egomaniacal gangster-clowns, red herrings and princesses with leering eyes and dishonorable intentions.
This is a decidedly meta affair, a movie about characters who all seem to know they’re in a movie as well as the histories and tropes of the genre they’re lovingly sending up, as well as a smart-ass tribute to a lowbrow literary tradition that was already anachronistic when Pulp was made.
Pulp just gets weirder and weirder and more meta as it goes on. The offhanded absurdity hits a strange apex/nadir when late in the film our intrepid gumshoe/scribe is visited by a character who looks and talks exactly like Humphrey Bogart and is credited as “The Bogeyman” (indeed, Robert Sacchi, the actor playing him, later went on to star in a 1980 flop called The Man with Bogart’s Face) hips our hero to some ugly truths.
Pulp is the quintessential troubled but interesting follow-up. It’s the kind of orphan that has apologists and defenders rather than fans, a self-consciously slight and quirky meditation on movies, mysteries and murder. Hodges and Caine following a stone-cold classic like Get Carter with a featherweight mystery-comedy goof like this recalls the Coen Brothers following the stone-cold classic Fargo with the eventual stoner classic The Big Lebowski, another featherweight mystery goof that got mixed reviews from critics wondering why the geniuses behind a recent smash were wasting their time with such glib foolishness.
Pulp is nowhere near as good as The Big Lebowski but it shares some of its prankster spirit. Expectations (and, since this was the early 1970s, audiences as well) were undoubtedly high for Caine and Hodge’s follow-up but this dynamic duo subverted expectations with an oddly engaging little sleeper that succeeds in no small part because it sets the bar, and the stakes, so perversely low.
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