Hack for Hire

By J.C.

Directed by MICHAEL HODGES Screenplay by MICHAEL HODGES

In the words of its hero-author Mickey King, who thoughtfully provides the narration, Pulp is a record of "that bizarre adventure that put five people in the cemetery and ruled me out as a customer for laxatives." It is also an absolutely smashing movie.

Mickey, played by Michael Caine, is the definitive hack, the proudly profane author of dozens of paperback thrillers, any one of which would make the novels of Mickey Spillane read like the collected works of John Ruskin. He turns out his books at the rate of 10,000 dictated words per day--just like Erie Stanley Gardner--and markets the finished products under a variety of exotic pseudonyms (like O.R. Gann, "a leading authoress," or "the struggling Nigerian author, S. Odomy"). He also adopts a zealously sleazy lifestyle and a cheap line of patter to fit his chosen profession. No sooner has Mickey polished off his newest thriller, The Organ Grinder, than he is approached by an unlikely p.r. type named Ben Dinunccio (Lionel Stander) with a mysterious proposition that turns out to be a commission to ghostwrite the autobiography of Preston Gilbert (Mickey Rooney). Gilbert is a runt who grew into Hollywood's No. 1 celluloid hoodlum and who, boasts Dinunccio, "boffed every leading lady he ever worked with."

Currently, Gilbert is combating illness, old age and dwindling celebrity in a Mediterranean villa that is decorated like an elaborate set from The Roaring Twenties. Soon after King's arrival, life begins to imitate artifice. There are decadent aristocrats, a mysterious mistress (Nadia Cassini), a vulturous ex-wife (Lizabeth Scott), and a professor from Berkeley (Al Lettieri) found dead in a bathtub--just like Diabolique--who pops up later as an assassin. And of course there are also the requisite bizarre coincidences, intimations of labyrinthine intrigues, and murders. It is all highly improbable, like one of Gilbert's movies or one of King's books.

The plot that Writer-Director Hodges has concocted is an affectionate and very often hilarious pastiche, at once a deft parody of a genre and loving tribute to it. In Hodges' first film, Get Carter (1971), he carried his absorption in the thriller close to outright imitation. For all its brutal energy, the movie was too heavily reminiscent of John Boorman's Point Blank. Hodges has not only got his distance in Pulp; he has also found a style and voice of his own. He is constantly, ebulliently inventive, whether in the scrupulously outrageous dialogue ("I expected the place to be crawling with cops, like maggots in a Camembert") or in one of the many dazzling visual jokes, like a group of Italian priests squirming through the humiliation of a police lineup.

Hodges even dares to have the story take a serious turn -- a rather abrupt one, to be sure, but audacious and very nearly successful. King becomes a prisoner of his own fantasies, crippled when the most lurid creations of his fiction become real and dangerous. His single defense is to wall himself up inside his own perfervid imagination, to distance reality until it becomes remote and unthreatening.

Always an adept actor, Caine is splendid here. His King, quintessentially seedy, strikes just the proper balance between calculated mediocrity and droll detachment. As Gilbert, Mickey Rooney is equal parts Robinson, Cagney and miniature tornado. It is a broad performance, but Hodges draws firm boundaries for it, which Rooney straddles occasionally but never oversteps. The performance, like the movie itself, deserves to become some crazy kind of minor classic.

--:J.C.

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