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- Upcoming talk: The motorcycle – rebel in pop culture
- Fifty years later, Get Carter is still the iconic British gangster film
- Heading north before Get Carter: The Reckoning (1970)
- My top 10 British gangster films
- Ghostly Messages: Australia’s Lost Horror Anthology, ‘The Evil Touch’
- Rosaleen Norton ‘The Witch of Kings Cross’
- Projection Booth episode #505: White Sands (1992)
- 2021 mid-summer reading report back
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Author Archives: Andrew Nette
Upcoming talk: The motorcycle – rebel in pop culture

A heads up to Pulp Curry readers, that on Thursday April 22 EST, I’ll be giving a talk to coincide with the exhibition currently being hosted by the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, The Motorcycle: Design, Art, Desire. The talk is entitled, ‘The Motorcycle: Rebel in Pop Culture’.
Throughout the decades, motorbikes have been portrayed as a symbol of freedom and rebellion in fiction, music and on the screen. I’ll be taking you on a journey through the different representations of the motorcycle in youth and popular culture history, mainly in the United States, Australia and Great Britain. I’ll be examining what has given the motorbike its cool reputation as well as discussing how it has also functioned as a lightning rod for post war concerns around various youth subcultures. The talk will focus on film, but I’ll also look at the representation of the motorbike in music and pulp fiction.
The talk, which will take place on Zoom, will start at 7pm EST, is free & your time zone permitting open to anyone anywhere to attend. All you have to do is book at this link. I hope you can attend.
Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1970s American crime films, Australian crime film, Beat culture, Book cover design, British pulp fiction, Crime film, Dystopian cinema, Girl Gangs, Biker Boys and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction & Youth Culture, 1950-1980, Horwitz Publications, Men's Adventure Magazines, Neo Noir, New English Library, Ozsploitation, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Rollerball, Vintage pulp paperback covers
Tagged Bikers, Bikies, Motorbikes in popular culture, motorbikes in pulp fiction, Motorcycle Rebel in Pop Culture, QAGOMA, The Motorcycle Design Art Desire, The Wild One (1953), Youthsploitation
Fifty years later, Get Carter is still the iconic British gangster film

When you get a moment, my latest for the CrimeReads site is on 50 years of Get Carter, how the Michael Caine revenge flick attained cult status and changed the face of British crime cinema. I don’t think Get Carter is the best British gangster film ever made but it is certainly the most influential. You can read my piece in full at this site via this link.
Posted in British crime cinema, British pulp fiction, Crime film, Heist films, Michael Caine, Neo Noir, Noir fiction, Richard Burton, Stanley Baker, Ted Lewis
Tagged British gangster cinema, crime films set in northern England, Get Carter (1971), Jack's Return Home, Michael Caine, Mike Hodges, Ted Lewis
Heading north before Get Carter: The Reckoning (1970)

This is an addendum to the post earlier in the week on my 10 favourite British gangster films (which you can read here), itself an homage to the 50th anniversary of seminal 1971 crime movie, Get Carter. Amid the responses to this piece was a recommendation I check out a 1970 film, The Reckoning. I’d vaguely heard of The Reckoning but hadn’t seen it and didn’t include it on that list because I didn’t think it was gangster film. And it’s not. But it is a really interesting piece of early seventies British cinema. A proto Get Carter that appeared a year earlier, it is similarly set in northern England and features as its key narrative a man who returns to the working class town of his youth on a mission of revenge.
Michael Marler (Nicol Williamson – best known for his role as Merlin in John Boorman’s 1981 film, Excalibur) is a hard living up and coming middle manager in a London firm that sells accounting machinery. He has fancy clothes, drives a Jaguar car, a beautiful home, and a beautiful trophy wife (Ann Bell), with whom he has a deceptively complex relationship. He is also an utter bastard. A flagrant womaniser, with no loyalty, who despises his managers at the company while at the same time sucking up to them.… Read more
My top 10 British gangster films

One of my favourite British gangster films, Mike Hodges’s Get Carter, is 50 years old. It premiered in the UK in the northern British city of Newcastle, where it was filmed, on March 7, and in the US on March 18. I have penned a piece for a prominent crime fiction/related site on the influence of Get Carter on crime cinema, but am not exactly sure when this will come out. For now, I thought the film’s half century anniversary was as good a time as any to hit you with my top 10 British gangster films.
They Made Me a Fugitive (1947)
I wrote about They Made Me a Fugitive in some length on this site here. It was one of a trio of early post-war British gangster films that caused a stir with censors, the others being No Orchids for Miss Blandish and Brighton Rock, both of which appeared in 1948. Fugitive stars Trevor Howard as Clem Morgan, a demobbed Royal Air Force pilot who reluctantly joins a criminal gang headed by a flash gangster with a very nasty streak, Narcy, but baulks when his discovers his new employer is into drug trafficking. What I love about this film, and the aspect that attracted the most critical condemnation when it first appeared, is its depiction of the poverty and desperation of post-war British life.… Read more
Posted in Billie Whitelaw, British crime cinema, British pulp fiction, Crime film, Heist films, James Hadley Chase, Joseph Losey, Michael Caine, Peter Yates, Richard Burton, Stanley Baker, True crime
Tagged Alfred Dimer, Billie Whitelaw, Billy Whitelaw, Bob Hoskins, British crime film, Get Carter (1971), Helen Mirren, James Hadley Chase, Joanna Pettet, John Guillermin, John McVicar, Jonathan Glazer, McVicar (1980), Mike Hodges, Never let Go (1960), No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948), Peter Sellers, Peter Yates, Richard Burton, Robbery (1967), Roger Daltry, Sexy Beast (2000), Stanley Baker, Stephen Berkoff, The Criminal (1960), The Great Training Robbery, The Krays (1990), The Long Goodbye (1973), They Made Me A Fugitive (1947), Trevor Howard, Villain (1971)
Ghostly Messages: Australia’s Lost Horror Anthology, ‘The Evil Touch’

In a June 2017 article in Fortean Times, the British magazine concerned with strange and paranormal phenomena, writer and broadcaster Bob Fischer discussed how the sensation of not being exactly sure what you were watching on television, or not being able to recall the details with any precision, was a common experience in relation to consuming visual culture in the 1960s and 1970s, before the advent of streaming, DVD, and VHS. This sense of “lostness”—of incomplete and unverifiable experience—is also what makes these memories such powerful nostalgia prompts.
The television viewing experience that most encapsulates this sense of lostness for me is a little-known, American-backed, Australian-made horror anthology series, The Evil Touch, that debuted on Sydney screens in June 1973 and in Melbourne a month later. Largely forgotten now, American critic John Kenneth Muir referred to the show in his 2001 book, Terror Television: American Series 1970-1999, as the “horror anthology that slipped through the cracks of time.” The Evil Touch has never had an official DVD release, although poor quality versions of some episodes can be found online, or as bootleg editions originally copied from television on VHS. It is not even known who now owns the rights. But the program was significant in many ways.
You can read the rest of the piece in full here at the We Are the Mutants site.… Read more
Posted in Australian popular culture, Australian television history, Dystopian cinema, Horror, Science fiction and fantasy
Tagged 1970s Australian television, Australian horror television, Fortean Times, horror pulp fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, John Kenneth Muir, Lost horror television, Lost television, Mende Brown, Television anthology horror, The Evil Touch