Tough Guys Don't Dance

This is one of my favorite movies. A strange mixture of seemingly unintentional humor , macabre plot twists, and the charm of off-season Provincetown. I wouldn't call it a drama. HILARIOUS. Patty L. is a real overdone nostril flaring trailer park siren. Ryan O'Neil seems to play the straight man to everyone else. I don't know how he maintained such a bland facade - I guess that's his style. He mostly stood around looking haggard, and so managed to provide something like a foil for all the circus freaks. At one point in the beginning of the film during a scene with his hard drinking crustacean of a father (L. T. is great), I thought I saw something like a suppressed smile cross the faces of both actors - a great moment that I'm sure was totally unintentional. Who wouldn't crack under the weight of all the corny dialoge? Contains the funniest dad and son out "fishing" in the rowboat at night scene ever filmed. I can still hear the foghorns. Despite all the corniness, its all somehow...so...mesmerizing....

When Lawrence Tierney utters the line that gives Tough Guys Don't Dance its title, he evokes the stoic, hard-boiled codes of post-war noir, felt in films he made like Born to Kill, The Bodyguard and The Devil Thumbs A Ride. And when Isabella Rossellini shows up, she suggests David Lynch's kooky and subversive Reagan-era suspense movies like Blue Velvet. These homages mark two of the many streams that flow into Norman Mailer's rhapsody on themes of sexual intrigue, multi-tiered duplicity and garish murders. (Mailer directed his movie from his 1984 novel.) It's a baroque contraption that comes close to self-parody - and may even cross the threshold - but neither is it just a fling at film making by a celebrity author intoxicated by his own publicity.

The forlorn setting is Cape Cod under the sign of Sagittarius: the dunes and the bars empty, and the Atlantic is choppy and gunmetal grey. Ex-con Ryan O'Neal (his boyish superstardom well behind him) has been drinking heavily since his wealthy if white-trash wife (Debra Sandlund) left him; one morning he wakes to find a tattoo on his arm and his jeep's upholstery soaked in blood. Circumstances lead him to a burrow where he stashes his marijuana harvest; in it he finds the severed heads of his wife and a woman he had picked up (along with her boyfriend) a few nights before.

The clues he starts piecing together lead him back down paths that wend through his own none-too-savory past. There's the out-of-town `couple' with whom he had spent a hard-drinking night (Frances Fisher and R. Patrick Sullivan); a woman he had once loved (Rossellini) now married to Provincetown's sadistic Chief of Police (Wings Hauser); another woman he had met when she was married to a wife-swapping Christian preacher (Penn Jillette) and who later wed a rich, spoiled Southern boy (John Bedford Lloyd) then, ultimately, O'Neal, whom she recently left. Helping him find his way is his gruff, cancer-ridden father (Tierney).

What plot line there is hangs on cocaine (maybe) and several millions, but that's but a pretext for Mailer to worry the preoccupations, even obsessions, which crop up again and again in his work, most notably the yin/yang of eroticism and violence. The women come across as predatory sirens but end up being almost beside the point - they're prizes for sexual competition between males, conflict that shades into edgy attraction, right up to taunting flirtation. (The movie is loaded with homosexual references, generally pejorative - the bisexual boyfriend is even given the name `Pangborn' - and the continuum of couplings, both on screen and in the back story, results in a very kinky daisy chain in which everybody save Tierney might just as well have slept with everybody else. Mailer comes close to suggesting that two men who have slept with the same woman share an implicit homosexual relationship themselves.)

Coming to Tough Guys Don't Dance expecting anything like a conventional suspense film (even something `post-' or `neo-') is to court disappointment. One comes for Mailer, who's like the little girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead: When he's good, he's very, very good, but when he's bad, he's horrid. How the proportions weight out in this movie can be argued, but adventurous and provocative nuggets nestle among some very bad choices (the acting runs the gamut from rather good to execrable, often within the same performance). Caveat spectator: wildly uneven and sometimes grotesquely macho, Tough Guys Don't Dance is far from negligible.

Writers, be they Philip Roth or Jacqueline Susann, invariably complain about how Hollywood makes a mess of their work when bringing it to the screen. Norman Mailer was different. Rather than let Hollywood ruin the movie version of his novel "Tough Guys Don't Dance," he chose to ruin it himself. That his movie has the ingredients to be a camp classic yet still falls short is all you need to know about Mailer's skills as a director.

And yet Mailer comes so close to making this disaster enjoyable. Just the dialog alone — an awkward mix 1940s gangster patois, writerly pretensions and gutter vulgarity, usually combined in a single sentence — should make this a must-see. The dialog doesn't sound like it would ever be uttered by actual people yet it's highly quotable (though not here). The only movies I've seen that refer to male genitalia as much as this one were gay porn videos, which is kind of surprising given the gay panic coursing through "Tough Guys" (second only to the misogyny). Or maybe it's not so surprising.

The cast of "Tough Guys Don't Dance" does its part to turn Mailer's movie into campy fun. Ryan O'Neal pounds the last nail into the coffin of his career as Tim Madden, the alcoholic would-be writer who can't quite remember if he's responsible for all the blood in his Jeep or the head buried with his marijuana stash. Though I kept thinking Nicolas Cage would've been so much more fun, O'Neal is actually effective in the role. Too bad his performance can't overcome that awful "oh god oh man" moment on the beach. A miscast Isabella Rossellini delivers her lines as if embarrassed to say them, but in her defense she does have to say things like: "He must have the biggest c—k in all Christendom." If Elizabeth Berkley of "Showgirls" fame were to play Maggie in a dinner theater production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" it might look something like Debra Sundland's portrayal of Madden's money-hungry ex-wife Patty Lareine. And yet Sundland is never quite that awesome. John Bedford Lloyd plays the part of Patty Lareine's bisexual ex-husband Wardley like a Southern belle suffering from a case of the vapors, so maybe it's perfectly natural that he would use a word like "imbroglio". But it's Wings Hauser who steals the show as the lunatic Capt. Alvin Luther Regency, the police chief—and seemingly the town's sole law enforcement officer—breathing down Tim's neck. Hauser doesn't chew the scenery; he unhinges his jaw and swallows it whole. Only Lawrence Tierney, as Madden's father Dougy, emerges from this movie with his dignity intact.

With a director blinded by ego, over-written dialog and over-the-top acting, "Tough Guys" should be in the same league as "The Oscar," "The Concorde-Airport '79" and the remake of "The Wicker Man." But with the exception of Hauser's performance, it never quite takes off to such giddy lows. It's a movie that's more fun to talk about than actually watch. I remember reading an article about the making of this movie in the late '80s, the lurid plot description – sex! drugs! violence! – enough to make me seek it out when released on video. I was profoundly disappointed. I expected trash, but I didn't expect it to be boring. I re-watched it recently and while I found it more entertaining, I was still disappointed. But Mailer didn't make this movie to please me, or anyone else. As made clear by trailer to his movie, in which the smirking author/auteur reads the scathing comment cards from test screenings, Mailer doesn't care what you think. The only opinion that matters is his, and in his own opinion "Tough Guys Don't Dance" is a good movie. You're just too dumb to appreciate genius.

The passage of time (now 1/28/11) heals all wounds. This flick may have been a laughing stock after release in 1987 but the passage of time has added new dimensions enabling the viewer to see it again from many different angles; one of which is the involvement of Norman Mailer who now possesses the mystical aura of a great artist post mortem. The campy acting and over the top attempts at noir now actually enhance this film. As a bonus there is the Cape Cod filming location with some wonderful views of the Cape in winter. The plot is complicated and almost rises to the level of a good screwball comedy although in this case the comedy is definitely black. Lots of bodies to be moved from place to place as the characters frantically try to stay one step ahead of whatever is threatening them at the moment. In the end, all is satisfactorily resolved and each character has been dealt with appropriately by fate. I thought that the last five minutes contained some of the best black comedy I've ever seen, all topped off by the happy fairy tale ending.

If you have an insatiable appetite for movies and want to get into something unusually tasty then serve yourself this movie tonight!

Important sidebar: if you've already read a critique posted on this site that nay-sayed this piece please do yourself a favor and etch-a-sketch that memory away. Though well-worded, Jack Sommersby's review of Tough Guys Don't Dance is just as equally misguided. For instance, the same gentleman who waxes that he was summarily summoned into Sleepyville three times before he was capable of viddying this work from beginning to end also asserts that it is a film that "you can't quite take your eyes off of." Believe me, you won't have a problem making more than "a bit of sense" from this mixture of the twisted, oddball and suspenseful. In fact even Doctor Dunderhead couldn't help but sleepwalk into a bit of truth when he characterized this Norman Mailer pastiche as "perversely fascinating." You don't need to know Jack to dig this flick the first time through, and you may find yourself revisiting it soon afterwards haunted by its savage and sublime reverbations.

This movie is a MUST SEE for film fans. Ryan O'Neal steps out from under typecasting--which has rendered him ineffective in much of his work--to engage in an often upsetting, yet somehow casual dance with the devil. He, Lawrence Tierney and Wings Hauser serve up sumptuous performances. All the while the supporting cast provides color, depth and character to a plot that is as unnerving as it is both captivating and entertaining.

Ignore Sir Superlative Sommersby's slight of hand and rent this movie! If I'm wrong then blast me back herein. On the other hand, if you like what you see then do me a favor and explain to me what the last phrase of Jaded Jack's review means--"rendering us helpless under power to disturb"!?! In the meanwhile, fellow movie devotee, keep on dancing.