Les vrais durs ne dansent pas

Okay, now that I have your attention, I don't guarantee that you will rate this the 7/10 I do, even if you qualify as an intelligent and advanced film buff. However, I do believe you will find something to chew on here.

It's written and directed by noted author Norman Maileer. And it's tough in every meaning of the word.

The rough plot sounds like a rather typical noir. An excessively drinking author given to memory blackouts doesn't know if he committed a murder or not.

Believe me, it's not that simple and Mailer takes us down a long winding and convoluted path before we know the whole story. At times, it seems ludicrous, and although I disagree with the Razzie noms it got, I understand. This is the type of movie which some will find inexorably bad.

However, it weaves a spell and the tough will stay with it because it's addictive. You will laugh at inappropriate times and groan sometimes, and yet the very serious film buff will continue watching it, and be glad he/she did. And I do believe that many will find this rewarding although certainly not unflawed. Maybe Mailer wanted it flawed.

As others mentioned, Wings Hauser is the perfect actor in this. However, Ryan O'Neal gave this his all, and veteran B film noir actor Lawrence Tierney also adds to this.

Some will love it; some will hate it. I did neither, but I did enjoy it. There was a point, the chain connecting the characters in their sex lives and in the chain of violence.

Love it or hate it, I suspect you will remember this one and not consider it a waste of time.

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....

What were they thinking? Didn't anybody read the script or did they read it and then lack the guts to tell Mailer it didn't work? Whatever the reason this is one pathetic film. Bad script and hilariously bad acting. It is the bad acting that keeps you watching. You want to find out how bad can it get. In most films, even bad ones, you can find something to recommend it. I can't think of anything to recommend about this one.

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.

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.