Icarus File No. 20: Tough Guys Don’t Dance (dir by Norman Mailer)

The 1987 film, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, opens with Tim Madden (Ryan O’Neal) talking to his father, tough Dougy (Lawrence Tierney). Dougy has stopped by Tim’s New England home to let Tim know that he has decided stop chemotherapy and accept his eventual death from cancer because, as Dougy puts it, “Tough guys don’t dance.” The tone of Dougy’s voice is all we need to hear to know that, in his opinion, his son has spent way too much time dancing.

Tim is an ex-convict turned writer and, when we first see him, he’s obviously had a few rough nights. He explains to Dougy that he woke up after a bender with his ex-girlfriend’s name tattooed on his arm, blood all over his jeep, and two heads dumped in his marijuana stash. Tim says that he’s hopeful that he’s not the murderer but he can’t be sure. He’s been drinking and doping too much. He suffers from blackouts. He’s not sure what happened.

The majority of the film is made up of flashbacks, detailing Tim’s affairs with a number of women and also his odd relationship with the town’s police chief, Luther Regency (Wings Hauser). Luther is married to Tim’s ex-girlfriend, Madeleine (Isabella Rossellini), who long ago accompanied Tim on a trip to North Carolina where they hooked up with a fundamentalist preacher (Penn Jillette) and his then-wife, Patty Lariene (Debra Sundland). (Tim found their personal ad while casually skimming the latest issue of Screw, as one does I suppose.) Patty Lariene eventually ended up married to Tim, though she has recently left him. As for Madeleine, she has never forgiven him for a car accident that they were involved in. Is Tim capable of loving anyone? Well, he does say, “Oh God, oh man,” repeatedly when he discovers that his wife has been having an affair.

Tim tries to solve the murders himself, finding that they involve not only him and Luther but also Tim’s old prep school friend, Wardley Meeks III (John Bedford Lloyd) and also some rather stupid drug dealers that Tim hangs out with. The plot is almost ludicrously convoluted and it’s tempting to assume that the film is meant to be a parody of the noir genre but then you remember that the film is not only based on a Norman Mailer movie but that it was directed by Mailer himself. Mailer, who was the type of public intellectual who we really don’t have anymore, was blessed with a brilliant mind and cursed with a lack of self-awareness. There’s little doubt that we are meant to take this entire mess of a film very seriously.

And the film’s theme isn’t hard to pick up on. By investigating the murders, Tim faces his own troubled past and finally comes to understand why tough guys, like his father, don’t hesitate to take action. Tough guys don’t dance around what they want or need. That’s a pretty common theme when it comes to Mailer. Tim Madden is not quite an autobiographical character but he is, by the end of the story, meant to represent the type of hard-living intellectual that Mailer always presented himself as being. Unfortunately, Ryan O’Neal wasn’t exactly an actor who projected a good deal of intelligence. And, despite his lengthy criminal record off-screen, O’Neal’s screen presence was somewhat docile. That served him well in films like Love Story and Barry Lyndon. It serves him less well in a film like this. It’s easy to imagine O’Neal’s Tim getting manipulated and, in those scenes where he’s supposed to be a chump, O’Neal is credible enough in the role. It’s far more difficult to buy the idea of Tim actually doing something about it.

Indeed, it’s hard not to feel that co-star Wings Hauser would have been far more credible in the lead role. But then, who would play Luther Regency? Hauser gives such a wonderfully unhinged and out-there performance as Luther that it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. Maybe Hauser could have played both Tim and Luther. Now that would have made for a classic film!

Tough Guys Don’t Dance is weird enough to be watchable. The dialogue is both raunchy and thoroughly humorless, which makes it interesting to listen to, if nothing else. The moments that are meant to be funny are so obvious (like casting noted atheist Penn Jillette as a fundamentalist) that it’s obvious that the moment that feel like clever satire were actually all a happy accident. As far as Norman Mailer films go, this one is not as boring as Wild 90 but it also can’t match the unhinged lunacy of a frustrated Rip Torn spontaneously attacking Mailer with a hammer at the end of the unscripted Maidstone. It’s a success d’estime. Mailer flew too close to the sun but the crash into the ocean was oddly entertaining.

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