The British writer-director Mike Holdges scored a big hit right out of the box with his first film, Get Carter (1971), which starred Michael Caine as a vengeful hit man and which just about single-handedly created a new kind of gritty British gangster movie. A couple of decades later, he helped make Clive Owen a movie star with another neo-noir, Croupier, a small film that narrowly escaped going to straight to video but managed to become a genuine sleeper. In between, he worked on probably his biggest-budgeted movie, the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production Flash Gordon, a somewhat underrated entertainment that is one of the few comics-based movies to achieve true camp--the real, gilded thing itself, mind you, not that sniggery TV-Batman stuff. Aside from these high points, Modges has enjoyed the kind of career you might expect from a smart, talented guy who basically works within the industry but whose instincts aren't strictly, safely commercial: he's made some films, such as the 1987 A Prayer for the Dying, that were reportedly mangled by the distributors, and some, such as the 1985 Morons from Outer Space, where it's tempting to think that some mangling could have only helped. He's also made some movies that, as he writes in an article in The Guardian, never had much of a chance to find an audience. Such as his first film after Get Carter, the tantalizingly bizarre comedy Pulp, which also starred Michael Caine. He played a sleazy writer hired to ghost write the memoirs of a movie star (Mickey Rooney) with actual gangland connections.
Hodges writes that the movie bewildered studio executives and so was banished to the vaults, where it "languished for a year or more. Then one day, a technician appeared, brushed the accumulated dust from its label to make sure he had the right unknown, unloved film, and loaded it on to a truck. It was on its way to New York." Pulp had been selected as the first film shown at a boutique theater in Manhattan that was designed to specialize in noteworthy films that the big chains had no interest in showing at all; in order to emphasize the collectors-item nature of the enterprise, the films were booked for one-week runs only. "Now, at last, the critics would get to see it. Much to the distributor's surprise, it received rave reviews. Time magazine got a little overheated and even mentioned the word 'masterpiece'. While I'm of the opinion that film critics spend too much time in the dark, I'm always grateful when, in the case of my own work, they come to the right conclusions." The only downside was that this was in the pre-Internet days when people had to actually wait a few days for such precious information to get out. By the time those rave reviews in the print magazines had hit the newsstands, the one-week run had ended and Pulp was back in the vault.
Hodges followed that one up with the sci-fi slasher movie The Terminal Man, based on a Michael Crichton novel. In this case, the results are harder to defend, but it does sound as if Hodges put a lot of thought into the choices that make the movie so cold and repellent. (It stars George Segal as a brain-damaged fellow who has part of his brain hooked to a computer to help him get over his bad habit of stabbing people. Guess what happens.) Clearly he responded on a surprisingly personal level to its "message" about the "obvious insanity at the very heart of what drives us," which "also drove me to make the film." For the score, Hodges went austere, using only Glenn Gould's recordings of The Goldberg Variations. The pianist was famously reclusive and paranoid, and the movie had to be sent to Toronto to be screened for him to get his approval for the use of the music. "His own solitary existence and extreme hypochondria," Hodges noted dryly, "must have made for a weird screening."
A "director's cut" of The Terminal Man is showing in London in December. On November 30, there will be a screening of what may be Hodges's most obscure obscurity, the fascinatingly moody thriller Black Rainbow (1989), starring Rosanna Arquette and Jason Robards. The movie was kicked under the sofa by distributors, and Hodges writes that "From then on I consoled myself by calling my work "films in bottles". They would wash up somewhere, some time, and maybe surprise somebody watching some remote cable channel in the early hours. This theory was proven correct one morning when I was working with composer Simon Fisher Turner on the music for Croupier... The doorbell rang. It was a Japanese musician friend of Simon's, who was built like a sumo wrestler. They did their business, and he was on his way out. He suddenly turned back and approached me. My name had rung a bell. 'You make Black Rainbow?' 'I did.' 'I see six times.' I was so astonished I assumed he'd seen it on video. 'No. In cinema. Black Rainbow very big in Japan.'"