Tracking Michael Caine — A Life in Film

Pulp (1972)

When Sir Michael Caine mentioned that “The Magus” was probably his worst film he might have forgotten about this one: a film that scores a perfect 10 on the Unbelievability Scale.

A strange, pointless story that I think is intended to be satire — but misses the mark so widely I don’t think there’s a literary term that describes it.

As any screenwriting teacher will explain: voiceover is the screenwriter waving the white flag of surrender . There was was no way to achieve the story’s ambitions with just images and dialogue, so one of the characters has to comment on the action invisibly from the side.

This is a technique that works in fiction (particularly pulp fiction) but to put the whole weight of the narrative on Caine sarcastically commenting gets tiresome after a while, and — in the end — “tiresome” describes the whole project.

I wasn’t able to find any financial numbers but I’ll bet that, like so many Michael Caine films, this one lost a ton of money.

The only silver lining to this cloud is the shooting location on the island of Malta, which looks like an intriguing place to visit.