Tough Guys Don't Dance Movie Review

Watching Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance is like being chained to a blind date with a 14-year-old motor mouth. You know his batteries will run down eventually, but in the meanwhile you find yourself entertaining the stray fantasy that Godzilla will turn up and flatten the kid. Mailer wanted his film noir to be “a murder mystery, a suspense tale, a film of horror—and a comedy of manners.” That's nice. Lots of little boys want to do five different things when they grow up. By the time they hit their 60s, they might wish for their film to be in a better league than Tough Guys Don't Dance. Mailer writes as if he spent most of his life running away from women whose sole aim is to chop off his “pride and joy” with a machete. Mailer thinks that life is like this film. He seems obsessed with the suspicion that any man anywhere might be abusing more women than he is. And if the man is black, or gay, or a preacher, or a policeman, the script takes especially vindictive turns. Much of the plot runs like something like this: A woman shoots a man. A woman shoots a woman. A man shoots a woman. A man shoots himself. Another woman shoots another man for calling her “small potatoes.” And so on. In a contrapuntal casting decision, Ryan O'Neal, arguably the most constipated actor in Hollywood, mouths Mailer's dialogue. Isabella Rossellini is around, presumably to lend an international panache to the proceedings, but she seems to be slumming. Clarence Williams III, who's done good work in bad films, has one entrance, which is also his exit from the plot. Veteran film heavy Lawrence Tierney is the only cast member who seems at ease in his tough guy role. The rest of the players do the best they can with what they have been given to do. The most revealing line in the film is, “I'm not a good enough writer to delineate how I really feel.” Tough Guys is crammed with Mailer dialogue so excruciatingly bad that the best possible marketing ploy for this mess would have been to slap it on a Golden Turkey triple bill so its filmmakers could nurse their hurt feelings all the way to the bank. woof!

1987 (R) 110m/C Ryan O'Neal, Isabella Rossellini, Wings Hauser, Debra Sandlund, John Bedford Lloyd, Lawrence Tierney, Clarence Williams III, Penn Jillette, Frances Fisher; D: Norman Mailer; W: Norman Mailer; C: John Bailey; M: Angelo Badalamenti. Golden Raspberry Awards ‘87: Worst Director (Mailer). VHS, LV, Closed Caption