Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987)

 

Director: Norman Mailer

Screenplay: Norman Mailer (with Robert Towne)

Based on a novel by Norman Mailer

Cast: Ryan O'Neal as Tim Madden; Isabella Rossellini as Madeleine Regency; Lawrence Tierney as Dougy Madden; Wings Hauser as Luther Regency; Debra Sandlund as Patty Lareine; Penn Jillette as Big Stoop; John Bedford Lloyd as Wardley Meeks III; Frances Fisher as Jessica Pond

An Abstract List Candidate

 

I'm a law enforcement officer, and it turns me on.

If I step back, I find the fact a Pulitzer Prize winning author helmed a Cannon Group released film, also produced by Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope Films, is a strange thing to even conceive let alone know the notoriety of the film. The oddest thing is knowing Mailer, of a school of American literature, came to cinema first in a series of low budget and ultra improvised films alien to Tough Guys Don't Dance, where infamously in Maidstone (1970) actor Rip Torn came at him with a hammer for real out of annoyance and the footage was kept in. The background is as appropriately strange for a very odd film.

Subdued and with a lush score from Angelo Badalamenti over the idyllic coast of Provincetown, this feels Lynchian and comes off as one of the more perplexing touches to a film which defies a lot of genre. Effectively, whilst there are likely films within this ballpark from decades earlier, Tough Guys predates the stranger crime films like The Big Lebowski (1998) and Inherent Vice (2014) that would get popular, where ex-con Tim Madden, as played by a very dishevelled Ryan O'Neil, is suffering through his wife Patty Lareine (Debra Sandlund) leaving him only to end up in a labyrinth of backstabbings, murders and a weird horror edge. Set up as a series of flashbacks, with a sombre reconciliation with his cancer stricken father, the film sits on a knife-edge. The horror-like edge is there, with talk of ghosts in his house, pirates off the coast of Massachusetts, O'Neil's blackouts especially when he finds that there are parts of two bodies in the basement he does not know the origins of. And the séance which his wife decided to have, leading to her deciding to leave him.

Tough Guys Don't Dance was not well regarded when it was first released. Few, when it was, liked the film with one of the exceptions being film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. Personally, I think this is a grower for me in that, whilst bad taste does streak the film, just for the end credit song alone, this is a compelling film; one where, if he did not admit it was as much a dark comedy, would be a surprise from Mailer as, contrary to its reputation for ridiculous dialogue and moments, it feels on purpose to be this perplexing in tone. A huge factor to consider in that, over this elaborate pulp narrative, a large part of its obsessions is with masculinity, a huge factor in Mailer's obsessions as an author. The film is crass and offensive in places - women get a short shrift and the homophobic slurs are used - yet it feels on purpose, as the men are neurotic, psychopathic and deceptive. A large part of this film, as with the source novel, involves these male characters not being comfortable in their sexuality, where the fear of being gay is drastically contrasted by an obsession and openly homoerotic borders.

And even the women in this film get to sling forth and back zingers in an over-ripe, profane language such as Debra Sandlund, whose filmography is not large at all, as a Southern wife of Madden who clawed and schemed her way to riches (including leaving an Evangelical preacher husband played by, naturally, magician and known sceptic Penn Jillette). Crime stories can something be as overripe as melodramas are, one usually targeted to a male audience whilst the other to women; gendering genres and types of cinema is deeply narrow minded and crass in general, but especially as Tough Guys Don't Dance posits that crime stories can be just as much melodramas.

A large part of the film is a lot of male ego, contrasted by powerful women, who are fragile and lot of angst as a result. As much of the film, as Madden is pulled in a strange course of events involving drug money and severed heads, is him being loomed over by the new police chief Luther Regency among other figures, as played by Wings Hauser in a role surprising subdued for a man know for cutting loose. Never was a film where masculinity is bandied about and bombastic, with Hauser of all the cast the most restrained for the most part, doing well playing a man close to an edge, until a break happens and you get an over-the-top moment involving facial paralysis and ridiculous mumbling. The notorious nature of the film is just how crass and over-the-top the dialogue can be but, as a melodramatic production, everything feels ripe with a legitimately strange edge. I have mentioned this feels like a predecessor to films like Inherent Vice, more arch and knowing films of that ilk, and honestly I wonder if Mailer had have made the film in the nineties or onwards, we may have gotten a more positive reputation for the movie.

Certainly, it has strange and illogical touches. The first flashback, in a structure which coils in on itself in medias res backwards, is as eighties as a Cannon Group production could be when the narrative begins at a party. Cocaine in lines being snorted on a table; eighties hairstyles and synth drum programming pop; a woman taking her clothes off down to a skimpy g-strip to greet Wings Hauser at the door; Debra Sandlund randomly playing a trumpet and then saying her golden pubic hairs were burnt by the college football team. Infamously, many know this production just for one scene, held as the worst line delivery in cinema, where O'Neil flatly shouts "oh God, oh man...!" in a sequence Mailer kept in. YouTube unfortunately is a format which reduces history to one clip without any context, and whilst that moment is an odd creative choice, in context it fits a film which is openly absurd. Mailer, if he has not deliberately made a dark humoured narrative, must have been amazingly oblivious to it, as so much of this feels on point. It is a film where the line "Your knife is in my dog" is spoken sincerely, but the random appearance of a pet dog is more perplexing for myself than the line, when we have never been introduced to Tim Madden having pets before then. The dialogue in that scene itself felt like a zinger a Coen Brother might have penned, and a lot of the film feels openly going for moments to shock or cause a viewer to laugh in a crime story of broad people self-destructing.

Certainly in terms of a pulp genre film, where the narrative once it is all explained is fully entrenched in clichés and tropes of the crime genre, the more overt and out-there aspects gain a greater sense of meaning even if there are eyebrow rising moments throughout. The amount of references to sex and masculinity, taken from the source material by Mailer too, feel intentional and his dialogue, as a legendary author, is so idiosyncratic it is compelling. The unexpected connections to David Lynch, whilst fully its own creation, really add an additional level as well. Isabella Rossellini, as the love of Madden's life Madeleine who he lost, fits the film's world fully, one where when after a car accident and losing her ability to have children it may seem strange for her to request cocaine from O'Neil in her hospital bed but, with her conviction and the tone already set up, feels fleshed out in its own mad logic. The music by Badalamenti, as naturally melodramatic as for Lynch, fits the tone perfectly as a score so emotionally welled up it almost at times feels like it will collapse into itself. That it sometimes does hit madness at some point does keep you on edge.

This is a film helped by its production quality. One of the most disarming aspects finally watching Tough Guys Don't Dance, contrary to the legend I had built up of a shambolic production, is that Mailer (who never helmed a film after this) helmed a solidly put together picture. One where he was aware of cinematic language, as an evocative moment using the camera really stood out, exiting a police station office from Hauser by moving the camera aware from him and the filing cabinets around him. So much is very well made it does make the stranger content even stranger. Again, everything in Tough Guys, for all its madness and legitimately odd tone, feels on point rather than a randomly thrown together production. Even in mind to Mailer's brief dalliance with Jean-Luc Godard - both walking off King Lear (1987) as Godard was hinting at an incestuous nature to the characters Mailer and his daughter Kate Mailer were to play, and that this film was released only days around Godard's - ominous seagull sounds, like those throughout King Lear, appear in one scene in a perverse synchronicity between the films as a result. That this film itself, in its apparently idyllic ending, which abruptly happens, has an uncomfortable edge of O'Neil staring almost to camera as he closes a front door to his new house, with ghoulish (almost screamed) laughter in the audio track, adds a sense of this entire experience provoking the viewer and keeping them on their toes.

Whether this film is digestible for most viewers or not, it absolutely needs a proper re-evaluation as a film that was belied against its will. The Cannon Group's later reputation, goofy yet fun b-pictures and weirdness, whilst as much of their charm, has accidentally not helped these curiosities from their cannon get wider interest - the John Cassavetes film Love Streams (1984) notwithstanding, what of this, King Lear, Robert Altman's Fools for Love (1985) or Raul Ruiz's Treasure Island (1985)? -  but the apparent view this was just a bad folly without looking back at it is an imp that needs to be exorcised off its shoulders. I openly admit that, the longer I think of this, I might grow to admire Tough Guys Don't Dance more and more as time goes on. I might even fall in love with the perverse bastard of a film.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Grotesque/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low