Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987) Cannon/Suspense-Thriller RT: 109 minutes Rated R (language, violence, nudity, sex, drugs) Director: Norman Mailer Screenplay: Norman Mailer Music: Angelo Badalamenti Cinematography: Mike Moyer and John Bailey Release date: September 18, 1987 (US) Cast: Ryan O’Neal, Isabella Rossellini, Debra Sandlund, Wings Hauser, John Bedford Lloyd, Lawrence Tierney, Penn Jillette, Frances Fisher, R. Patrick Sullivan, John Snyder, Stephan Morrow, Clarence Williams III. Box Office: $858,250 (US)
Rating: *
Although Tough Guys Don’t Dance is technically a crime thriller, it’s also an unintentional comedy thanks to the utter ineptitude with which it was made. It’s a bad movie, no two ways about it. At the same time, it’s mesmerizing. It’s a like a twisted train wreck. It’s a horrific sight, but you can’t look away. I missed it when it played at the movies (it was a one-week wonder, no surprise there); I had to wait until it came out on video a few months later. I stayed up late to watch it and afterwards felt as though it robbed me of precious sleep time as well as the rental price. I had no desire to rewatch it until recently. I was curious if I would like it any better. While I can’t say that I like Tough Guys Don’t Dance, I have a better grasp of cinema than I did as a 20YO community college student/movie geek. I can better identify how, where and why writer-director Norman Mailer failed.
In adapting his own novel for the big screen, Mailer has made a confusing, convoluted mess of Tough Guys Don’t Dance. The plot defies explanation. It also defies logic, coherence and gravity. I’ll do my best, but I’m not sure I can do it justice. Don’t expect a miracle.
Ex-con/struggling writer Tim Madden (O’Neal, Love Story) wakes up from a drunken bender with no recollection of recent events. Naturally, he has many questions. Where did the tattoo on his arm come from? What’s with all the blood in his jeep’s passenger seat? Why does the new chief of police, Luther Regency (Hauser, Vice Squad), hate him so much? And, most importantly, who’s severed head did he find in the spot where he hides his marijuana stash? All signs point to him being framed for murder. Who would do this?
Tim recounts the past five days to his dying father Dougy (Tierney, Reservoir Dogs), the only one he doesn’t suspect of setting him up. It all started nearly a month earlier when Tim’s trashy wife Patty Lareine (Sandlund) walked out on him. She’s a materialistic gold-digger with one high-paying divorce under her belt already. She was previously married to an old prep school chum of Tim’s, a rich moron named Wardley Meeks III (Lloyd, The Abyss). One night, Tim meets this strange couple at the local bar, a former porn actress (Fisher, Unforgiven) and her obviously gay husband (Sullivan). Let’s just say they don’t spend the night just talking. Also on the scene is his former girlfriend Madeleine (Rossellini, Blue Velvet) who wants nothing to do with him. There’s also some business about a $2 million cocaine deal. Oh yeah, a second severed head turns up too.
Did I mention Tough Guys Don’t Dance is a mess? That’s right, I did. Characters come and go. The story jumps between past and present. There are flashbacks within flashbacks. The viewer feels as confused and paranoid as the movie’s protagonist. You’d think a crime writer of Mailer’s caliber would be able to put together a cogent screenplay. He might have been if Mailer the director didn’t get in the way. He doesn’t seem to know exactly what he’s going for with Tough Guys Don’t Dance. At times, it wants to be a complex, Big Sleep-like crime noir. Other times, it wants to be a weird, Blue Velvet-like dark comedy. This tonal inconsistency results in a markedly uneven movie. It’s impossible to know how to take it as anything other than a bad movie classic.
The acting in Tough Guys Don’t Dance is all over the place. There’s a lot of overacting with O’Neal and Hauser being the main offenders. There’s a scene where O’Neal’s character is handed a note containing bad news. When he reads it, he reacts by repeating “Oh, God! Oh, man!” about a dozen times while the camera goes wild. The clincher is that he reacts more calmly when he finds the first head. Now that I think of it, the info in the note should not have come as a surprise. O’Neal’s line readings are unnatural and unconvincing. He’s not believable as an ex-con. Hauser delivers a wild-eyed performance as Regency, a Vietnam vet whose psychotic tendencies are clear early on. The guy owns a machete, for Pete’s sake! Lloyd, on the other hands, acts like a character from a Tennessee Williams play with that God-awful accent. It could be Southern, it could be patrician; who knows? Rossellini is positively wasted here. As for Williams (The Mod Squad, 52 Pick-Up), he’s in it for one scene and does nothing. He plays NO part in the movie’s plot. Talk about wasting a cool actor!
The one and only decent performance comes from the gravelly-voiced Tierney who plays the movie’s one and only interesting character. He gets off one of the best lines when he says, “I just deep-sixed two heads.” There’s something inherently cool about Tierney. He was born to play tough guy characters in B-level crime noirs. He gives the movie its sole element of class.
Tough Guys Don’t Dance is filled with bad dialogue like Tim telling an injured thug “Your knife is in my dog” before vandalizing his car with a lead pipe. The topper has to be when Wardley (I love the names in this movie!) says, “I am all wrong for this kind of imbroglio!” Who talks like that?
The score by Angelo Badalamenti, a frequent David Lynch collaborator, is overbearing and intrusive. The opening theme is kind of nice though. The action takes place in Provincetown in winter meaning no tourists. It’s practically a ghost town haunted by residents who feel like malevolent spirits. The cold, bleak look of Tough Guys Don’t Dance is its other high point, but good cinematography doesn’t make up for its many failings. It doesn’t cover up the fact that it makes no sense. It doesn’t make up for the horrendous acting. Simply put, it’s a bad movie but since it’s an entertainingly bad one, it gets a pass (kind-of/sort-of).
