cult film freak: MICHAEL CAINE & MIKE HODGES FOLLOW 'GET CARTER' WITH 'PULP'

Michael Caine gets fiction in PULP Year: 1972 Rates: ****

Director Mike Hodges and his GET CARTER anti-hero Michael Caine found the perfect antidote in PULP, a dark comedy in which a deliberately bad "gangster fiction" novelist becomes part of his own style of flimsy storytelling while narrating along in the usual Gumshoe fashion...

Then landing a plot/purpose after a random and eclectic forty-minutes of anticipation for a has-been actor that Caine's slippery scribbler will ghostwrite an autobiography for...

Al Lettieri and Michael Caine in PULP

Enter Mickey Rooney as a George Raft/James Cagney hybrid who, for no reason, annoys Caine immediately. Sure he's obnoxious but doesn't seem bad enough to steer the audience to dislike. Meanwhile, Hodges trades his dark and dangerous GET CARTER Newcastle, England location for the sunny biblical-like island of Malta...

That eclectically harbors a pool of shocked secretaries transcribing King's erotic prose; Lionel Stander as Rooney's mafioso partner; Noir veteran Lizabeth Scott as a Fascist candidate's sultry wife; stock ingenue Nadia Cassini as our own stock ingenue; GODFATHER villain Al Lettieri as an enigmatic red-herring; and Al Pacino's GODFATHER II bodyguard Amerigo Tot as a helpful communist...

Nadia Cassini in PULP

All reminding the smug central character and audience there's a movie going on that he's more stuck inside of than an integral part in: So between the talky meantime and sporadic sudden bursts of jarring, noisy, deliberately overblown violence: you have to simply let go and just go with it...

And, while quite silly compared to Mike Hodges' and Michael Caine's previous neo noir, GET CARTER, both share an extremely dark backstory serving into each twist ending.