Tough Guys Don't Dance (film)

Tough Guys Don't Dance is a 1987 film from Cannon Films written and directed by Norman Mailer based on his novel of the same name. It is a murder mystery/film noir piece that was scorned both by audiences and critics alike.

Plot

Writer, ex-con and 40-something bottle-baby Tim Madden, who is prone to black-outs, awakens from a two-week bender to discover a pool of blood in his car, a blond woman's severed head in his marijuana stash, and the new Provincetown police chief, Capt. Alvin Luther Regency, shacked up with his former girlfriend Madeleine. As his father Dougy helps him try to unravel the mystery, he is dogged by the psychotic Regency, who has it in for Tim as a car-crash that he was involved in with Madeline has left her unable to have children.

Reception

(All critical blurbs come from the reviews hosted at Rotten Tomatoes.) The critical reception was less than stellar. Hal Hinson of the Washington Post said that the film was "hard to classify; at times you laugh raucously at what's up on the screen; at others you stare dumbly, in stunned amazement." Roger Ebert, in a 2 1/2 star review in the Chicago Sun-Times praised the cinematography, the Provincetown setting, and said that the relationship between Tim and Dougy was the best aspect of the film, but also had to say that "what is strange is that Tough Guys Don't Dance leaves me with such vivid memories of its times and places, its feelings and weathers, and yet leaves me so completely indifferent to its plot. Watching the film, I laughed a good deal." However, the film had at least two supporters. Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader, said "Norman Mailer's best film, adapted from his worst novel, shows a surprising amount of cinematic savvy and style." Also, "He translates his high rhetoric and macho preoccupations (existential tests of bravado, good orgasms, murderous women, metaphysical cops) into an odd, campy, raunchy comedy-thriller that remains consistently watchable and unpredictable--as goofy in a way as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Where Russ Meyer featured women with oversize breasts, Mailer features male characters with oversize egos, and thanks to the juicy writing, hallucinatory lines such as "Your knife is in my dog" and "I just deep-sixed two heads" bounce off his cartoonish actors like comic-strip bubbles; even his sexism is somewhat objectified in the process." Vincent Canby of the New York Times said that "Not the high point of the Mailer career, but it's a small, entertaining part of it." It didn't do too well in theaters, making only $858,250, nearly a fifth of its $5,000,000 budget. It (as of November 26, 2007) holds a 41% "rotten" rating at Rotten Tomatoes. However, in the years since the film's release on video, it's become a cult classic in bad movie circles. Channel 4 Film said "The overkill is strangely compelling and Mailer's disregard for taste and convention ensure his film is a massive but spectacular and unmissable folly." The movie apparently got enough of a following for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who owns much of Cannon's film library, to release an anamorphic widescreen DVD of the film on September 16, 2003. The disc contained an interview with Norman Mailer, a tour of Provincetown and the film's trailer.

Trivia

• Norman Mailer, in the interview on the DVD, said that he was counseled to cut the ending of the scene in which Ryan O'Neal's character Tim Madden reads a note from his ex-girlfriend Madeline informing him that his wife was having an affair with her husband in which he exclaims "Oh God! Oh Man! Oh God! Oh Man!" due to O'Neal's poor performance. Mailer kept it in because he thought the poor line-reading actually added something to the picture. O'Neal, who had been friendly with Mailer, turned on him as the bit revealed his short-comings as an actor and embarrassed him.
• Roger Donahue was the prizefighter thanked by Norman Mailer for telling him the anecdote that resulted in the title. The anecdote was: Frank Costello, the Murder Inc. honcho, and his gorgeous girlfriend greet three champion boxers in the Stork Club. Costello demands that each, in turn, dance with the woman, and each nervously complies. The last, Willy Pep, suggests that Mr. Costello dance. Costello replied, 'Tough guys don't dance.'
• The script had revisions done by Chinatown and Last Woman on Earth scribe/script doctor Robert Towne.

Awards