Les vrais durs ne dansent pas

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.

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.

Norman Mailer used to mean something, literary-wise. He was a Big Noise back in the fifties and sixties trying to be the heir apparent to his hero Hemingway, but since Mailer was really just a small-statured city boy with no interest in the outdoors he resorted to games of thumb-wrestling and head butting men (and assaulting women) instead of hunting and traveling. Like this movie, Mailer is a juvenile, woman-hating, gay-hating, faux-tough guy obviously obsessed with his fragile masculinity. Decades of hype and bad writing and activities (including the notorious Abbott disaster) have reduced his noisy reputation to virtual silence. He has become as pathetic as this movie, based on another one of his terrible novels. Granted this film is more coherent than his previous directorial attempts way-back-when (i.e. 'Wild 90,' 'Maidstone') there is still no reason to give it any more credibility considering its supreme awfulness. Of course, there IS the 'Showgirls'-like aroma of a risible good time to be had for those inclined to cheer on the execrable disasters of filmmakers who thought they were making something worthwhile and were so very wrong. For other viewers this is a stupefying experience mirrored by the consistently haggard look of Ryan O'Neal throughout. Like Spike Lee, Mailer MUST include his obsessions on screen. Ala Spike, consider this a 'Norman Mailer Joint.' That means you will hear men grousing to other men about "being men" and "not being fags" and how spiteful and cruel all women are, and it will be spoken in purplish film-noir-meets-gym-locker-room dialogue (my favorite: "Don't tickle my stick.") There will be countless scenes of women degrading themselves for no reason or men complaining/crying because those ruthless harpies have emasculated them. Since it's directed by a rank amateur, naturally the actors look either lost or unhinged. In short, this film, like its author, is an embarrassment.

Oh, Norman Mailer - acclaimed author, won more prizes than you can count in one minute, and occasional maker of films (a number of them basically like shoots in a weekend with friends in his living room, or so I've been told, I haven't seen the Eclipse box-set yet of his other works). In 1987 he was given carte blanche, via Cannon films and producer Francis Ford Coppola, to take his windy, warped novel that poked fun at pot-boilers and crime fiction (film noir especially) and made it into a movie. And the results are completely befuddling.

I think a lot of it comes down to plot logic. In that, this doesn't have that much. Sure, we follow along Ryan O'Neal as he is trying to figure out a mystery involving a lost woman, an old affair, and, uh, other things. It even has one of those plot-framing devices that opens the movie, where O'Neal is telling his story to father(?) Lawrence Tierney and then this just... disappears for a LONG stretch of the film, to the point where I forgot it was even a thing. There's also Isabella Rossellini (in seemingly the one performance playing it straight, or trying to), and another actor - damn if I forget his name - who is a cop that often appears wigged out (probably on coke, who knows it was the 80's).

I wish I could explain what happens in this movie and why it's so f***ed up, but it just boggles my mind! So much of it comes down to Mailer not really being able to transition his dialog, which probably worked OK on the page (and even there one wonders if it was still questionable), to the format of the screen. People just... don't talk like this! The verbiage is off the charts in this one - but there are moments where, I THINK anyway, Mailer knew he had something really warped and just went for it. The scene that I know I'll never forget and many others haven't is when Ryan O'Neal's character discovers a letter from a woman from his past, it gives him some crucial, heartbreaking information, and then he just bursts with "OH MAN, OH GOD, OH MAN" for about 15 minutes as the camera pans around him in a dizzying effect. If this was meant for comedy then it's genius on par with the Zucker brothers or Mel Brooks. If it's supposed to be in any kind of Earth reality, it's a disaster-zone.

But oh, what a watchable movie made of WTF. Part of what helps is that it is competently shot and edited, and the performers, alongside those I mentioned Penn Jillette and Frances Fisher pop up, are trying to give it their all and be true to the material. But by being true to it means showing how completely nuts it is. Maybe the most golden part of the experience is the theatrical trailer for the film itself, where Normal Mailer on camera reads the mix of reviews - the good, the bad and the 'Uh say what' - and that makes me happy alone the movie was made. I have a feeling doing a double feature of this and another 1987 Cannon films art-house release, Godard's King Lear, could be just the thing to make you go run for the hills... or break your brain laughing. It may be awful, but it's awful in a spectacular way.

There are a lot of people who really hate this movie. Then strangely they go on and on detailing the things that bother them about it but that they also find fascinating and relentlessly hypnotic.

It's unfortunate that people are so rigid in their definition of what makes a 'good' movie.

Norman Mailer is by no means a terrible director. He actually does a very credible and commendable job of adapting his own novel to the screen. The dialogue is at times overblown and purplish, but it is never boring and frequently it's downright brilliant.

Every performer acquits themselves well, even Debra Sandlund as Patty Laureine, Wings Hauser as the sociopathic macho police chief and John Bedford Lloyd as the eccentric, messed-up millionaire, all of whom can be accused of overacting. But ultimately their performances are completely in tune with their insane characters and draw us into a nasty labyrinth of twisted emotions and nightmarish memories. Ryan O'Neal actually gives one of his finest performances as an alcoholic loser who has messed up his life and who is so prone to blackouts, he's not even sure if he's killed someone. Lawrence Tierney is excellent as his tough guy dad who helps him make sense of the chaos in their small-shut-up-for-the-winter-and-consequently-spooky-as-hell Provincetown coastal neighborhood. Isabella Rossellini is also great in what appears to be an, at first impression, thankless role, but who in fact turns out to be the character who gets the last word and the best revenge.

The great thing about this film is it manages to have its cake and eat it, too. It's not only an at times very creepy modern film noir, it's also a frequently hilarious black comedy. Also, contrary to some people's perceptions, the film has a complex narrative structure that pulls the viewer in, much like the best mysteries. If you go in not expecting a conventional mystery thriller but more of a cross between David Lynch, Roman Polanski, Jules Feiffer, Hal Ashby and maybe Arthur Penn(when he directed NIGHT MOVES), I guarantee you you will not be disappointed.