Pulp

"The day started quietly," says Mickey King (Michael Caine) in voiceover as this 1972 film begins. "Then I got out of bed." Directed and written by Mike Hodges, who had worked with Caine on Get Carter a year earlier, Pulp is filled with such droll witticisms. A former funeral director who turned to writing detective novels ("an ideal life, but for the writing") under such noms de plume as Les B. Han, O. R. Gann, and Guy Strange, King is the focal point of what he describes as "a bizarre adventure which put five people in the cemetery and ruled me out as a customer for laxatives." Unfortunately, the tale isn't nearly as engaging as the dialogue. Hired to ghostwrite the autobiography of retired American movie star Preston Gilbert (Mickey Rooney in scenery-chewing mode), an actor who specialized in playing gangsters and may actually be one, King travels to scenic Malta, where he mingles with various colorful characters and interviews the blustery, voluble Gilbert—until the latter is wiped out in a mob hit (by a dude in priest garb, natch), at which point our hero turns sleuth as he tries to figure out why and avoid becoming the next in line to receive "the Big Absolution." Pulp has quite a few nice touches and an appealingly light, parody-like tone, but in the end, there's just not a lot of there there. Optional. (S. Graham)