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Mickey King (Michael Caine) is a pulp writer, selling cheap thrills on
paper under a host of pseudonyms with quite some success - and to not have
to share his income with his ex-wife, he has long relocated to Malta. But
while he's used to writing mindless and sleazy gangster fare, his PR man
Dinuccio (Lionel Stander) now sets him up with a special assignment, to
become a ghostwriter of popular gangster actor Preston Gilbert (Mickey
Rooney) - who is said to have ties to the mob himself, which is why
getting Mickey to Preston's place is shrouded in secrecy that forces him
to take a dead-boring tourist bus tour across the island - on which one of
the passengers, Miller (Al Lettieri) is shot, apparently in Mickey's
place. Writing Preston's bio goes without a hitch, even if Preston's an
ass who's way too full of himself, but before the book manages to even
make the way to its publisher, Preston's shot dead at a party, and Mickey
can only just escape being shot as well, and the only thing he's sure of
is there's a gunman after him now. Investigating why anybody would even
find him interesting enough to want to kill, Mickey finds out about a
scandal from ten years ago, a scandal that might also involve one of the
island's most successful politicians (Victor Mercieca), who has incidently
stolen Preston's wife (Lizabeth Scott) a few years back ... By the way,
one of the first movies featuring Humphrey Bogart impersonator Robert
Sacchi. Even if above synopsis might make Pulp sound
like a rather tense thriller, and it's bloody and suspenseful enough to be
just that, it's mostly played for laughs, with Michael Caine giving an
intentionally too-cool-for-his-own-good performance, the rest of the cast
(especially Mickey Rooney and Lionel Stander) hamming it up with relish,
scenes breaking out into slapstick ever so often, and Michael Caine's
off-screen narration that seems to be lifted straight from any number of
pulp novels being the icing on the comedy cake. And it works, too, thanks
to a rather tight script, direction and camerawork that avoid the
ridiculous-for-its-own-sake like plague, and an atmosphere typical to the
1970s that seems to breathe coolness and that's only rarely even tried to
achieve nowadays. Pretty much a must-see!
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