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Tag Archives: Michael Caine
Faux-noir: Pulp, 1972
Pulp is a 1972 comedy/drama, written and directed by Michael Hodges, who is mostly famous for directing the British noir Get Carter featuring Michael Caine.
Caine stars in Pulp, too – and is also a co-producer.
Originally titled Memoirs of a Ghostwriter, the movie is a flawed gem, one that probably suffers from striving too hard. It plays with hard boiled, Chandleresque fiction, and at times it’s quite funny, but the end result is ultimately inferior to the sum of its parts. There could be an intelligent satire, hiding inside of the film, but it’s sometimes hard to catch glimpses of it. Continue reading
Erle Stanley Gardner’s Trick
The writer’s life would be ideal but for the writing. That was a problem I had to overcome. Then, I read in the Guinness Book of Records about Erle Stanley Gardner – the world’s fastest novelist – who can dictate up to the rate of ten thousand words a day. That was for me. None of that romantic stuff with a typewriter. I had better uses for those two particular fingers.
The quote above is from a 1972 movie called Pulp, featuring Michael Caine as a rather sleazy pulp novelist that gets involved in a complicated – and in the end pretty ludicrous – caper with mobsters, killer and what else.
The bit about Erle Stanley Gardner is true. Continue reading
Dravot & Peachy
Yesterday afternoon we were discussing favorite adventure movies, with some friends online, and John Huston‘s The Man Who Would be King came up.
I saw the movie in the Colosseo cinema, in Via Madama Cristina, in Turin, in 1976, with my mother and my grandmother.
I wonder if today they’d let a not-yet-ten-years-old kid in the cinema to watch a movie that features (according to the current advisory)
Sex and Nudity, Violence and Gore, Profanity, Alcohol/Drugs/Smoking, and Frightening/Intense Scenes.
Quite a package, and without mentioning British imperialism.
But those were different times, I guess1. Continue reading
Karavansara 