Tough Guys Don't Dance (film)

Tough Guys Don't Dance is a 1987 crime mystery comedy-drama film 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 by audiences and critics alike. It was screened out of competition at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival.^[2]

The script had revisions done by Chinatown and Last Woman on Earth scribe/script doctor Robert Towne. The title comes from an anecdote told to Norman Mailer by a prizefighter named Roger Donahue: 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, Willie Pep, suggests that Mr. Costello dance. Costello replied, "Tough guys don't dance."

Plot

Writer Tim Madden, who is prone to blackouts, awakens from a two-week bender to discover a bloodbath in his car,then sees a woman's severed head in his marijuana stash, and the new Provincetown, Massachusetts, police chief, Luther Regency, shacked up with his former girlfriend Madeleine.

Flashing back, Madden remembers the time when he encouraged Madeline to swing with a Li'l Abnerish couple from down South, the fundamentalist preacher Big Stoop and his Daisy Mae-ish wife, Patty Lareine, whose ad Tim had come across in Screw magazine. It is on the trip back that the car crash occurs, Madeline incensed along the way that Tim has so enjoyed Patty Lareine's charms.

Except for his father, who is dying of cancer, Tim suspects everyone, including Patty Lareine, multi-millionaire prep-school pal Wardley Meeks III — and even himself — of murder. Patty Lareine had left Big Stoop, married Wardley, left him in a messy divorce that netted her a rich cash settlement, and in turn married Tim, whom she fancied. Patty Lareine disappears, and Tim goes on his fatal bender that has left his memory in shards after receiving a letter from Madeline informing him that her husband is having an affair with his wife.

Tim remembers his assignation in the local tavern's parking lot with the blond porn star Jessica Pond, while her effete husband Lonnie Pangborn watched from the sidelines, distraught. It was Jessica's head in the Hefty bag with his grass, but soon another head turns up in his marijuana stash, that of Patty Lareine.

Box office

The film was a box office bomb, making only $858,250,^[3] less than a fifth of its $5 million budget.

Reception

Tough Guys Don't Dance has received negative reviews. It currently holds a 39% "rotten" rating at Rotten Tomatoes.^[4]

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 the film was "not the high point of the Mailer career, but it's a small, entertaining part of it".

In the years since the film's release on video, the film has become a cult classic in bad film 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 film 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.

Awards

References

Discography

The CD soundtrack composed and conducted by Angelo Badalamenti is available on Music Box Records label (website).

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Tough Guys Don't Dance

• Tough Guys Don't Dance at the Internet Movie Database
• Tough Guys Don't Dance at AllMovie
• Tough Guys Don't Dance at Box Office Mojo
• Tough Guys Don't Dance at Rotten Tomatoes

Norman Mailer
Fiction	The Naked and the Dead Barbary Shore The Deer Park An American Dream The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer Why Are We in Vietnam? A Transit to Narcissus The Executioner's Song Of Women and Their Elegance Ancient Evenings Tough Guys Don't Dance Harlot's Ghost The Gospel According to the Son The Castle in the Forest
Non-fiction	"The White Negro" Advertisements for Myself The Presidential Papers Cannibals and Christians The Bullfight The Armies of the Night The Idol and the Octopus Miami and the Siege of Chicago Of a Fire on the Moon King of the Hill The Prisoner of Sex Existential Errands St. George and The Godfather The Faith of Graffiti Genius and Lust Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots Pieces and Pontifications The Spooky Art Why Are We At War?
Biography	Marilyn: A Biography The Fight Oswald's Tale Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
Film	Beyond the Law Wild 90 Maidstone Tough Guys Don't Dance
Teleplays	The Executioner's Song American Tragedy Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story
Other	Strawhead (play) The Deer Park (play) Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters) (poetry) Some Honorable Men (anthology) The Time of Our Time (anthology) Modest Gifts (poems and drawings) The Big Empty (dialogues) On God (conversation) "The Time of Her Time" (short story)
Film and TV adaptations	The Naked and the Dead An American Dream Marilyn: The Untold Story
Related	Adele Morales (second wife) Jeanne Campbell (third wife) Norris Church Mailer (wife) Kate Mailer (daughter) Michael Mailer (son) Stephen Mailer (son) John Buffalo Mailer (son) Norman Mailer Prize Stabbing of Adele Morales by Norman Mailer The Last Party New York City: the 51st State In the Belly of the Beast
Category