Any movie called Pulp is one we must watch, and since Mike Hodges of Get Carter fame helmed the production we were confident going in, especially since we knew it featured bombshell Nadia Cassini and numerous locations in some of the prettiest and most remote parts of Malta. In fact, as a travel piece the film is flawless (Hodges could have written it for the sole purpose of getting a Mediterranean vacation on the Hollywood dime), but as satire, it’s torturous, despite a few clever sight gags and four or five sharp one-liners.

Don’t get us wrong—there are merits: always-interesting star Michael Caine, character actor Lionel Stander, and Hollywood icon Mickey Rooney. But there was also a lot of bad: star Michael Caine sleepwalking through the production in owl glasses and a pompadour, character actor Lionel Stander in a cock-hugging one-piece bathing suit, and Hollywood icon Mickey Rooney getting his dangle on in size forty tightie-whities. To quote our girlfriends, “Eew.” Yes, we know they’re riffing on their own tough-guy images. But still, eew.

The main problem with this movie is there’s simply no—if you’ll excuse the term—thrust to the plot. Even satire needs to go somewhere, otherwise it's just middle-aged men showing their packages for nothing. If Rooney and Stander ever watched Pulp without cringing they did better than us. However, since scantily-clad men are rare in the macho world of pulp, we’ve posted some beefcake as a treat, below. And afterwards, we have some shots of Malta that’ll really turn you on. Pulp opened in the U.S. this week in 1972.

Here’s a little artifact from our trip to Paris last year, which we picked up from one of the booksellers by the Pont Neuf. It’s a Louis de la Hattais novel from 1957, part of the “Allo Police” collection printed by Société d’Editions Générales. It’s called Des Mégots pour al Petit!, which means Cigarette Butts for the Little Girl. De la Hattais was a prolific mid-century pulp author, and we’ve actually seen a lot of his books around, although we suspect he was actually a pseudonym. We'll find out and get back to you on that. As far as the art goes, while it may be less masterful than that of pulp icons such as Aslan and Robert McGinnis, we find it quite effective. So much so that just for your visual pleasure this Wednesday, we’ve posted a few more “Allo Police” covers below. Enjoy. 

We’ve seen a lot of covers for James M. Cain’s classic 1934 pulp The Postman Always Rings, but never one quite as unhinged as this Bruguera Spanish edition. Whereas the art is almost comical, in the fiction Cain’s murderous lovers are anything but. In fact, Postman was considered so provocative for its time that it was banned in Boston. The book is short (possibly that’s why it’s paired here with Cain’s The Embezzler), and its concise story arc made it a natural for adaptation to cinema. Over the years it spawned four official film versions, and its influence is detectable in many other movies. We recommend giving this one a read, and also, take the lesson of the cover to heart and leave your girl’s fancy soaps alone.