Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987) 6 out of 6 people found the following...(More)

Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987) 6 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :- A very funny and perverse diversion, This is one of my favorite movies. A strange mixture of seemingly unintentional humor , macabre plot twists, and the charm of off-season Provincetown. I wouldn't call it a drama. HILARIOUS. Patty L. is a real overdone nostril flaring trailer park siren. Ryan O'Neil seems to play the straight man to everyone else. I don't know how he maintained such a bland facade - I guess that's his style. He mostly stood around looking haggard, and so managed to provide something like a foil for all the circus freaks. At one point in the beginning of the film during a scene with his hard drinking crustacean of a father (L. T. is great), I thought I saw something like a suppressed smile cross the faces of both actors - a great moment that I'm sure was totally unintentional. Who wouldn't crack under the weight of all the corny dialoge? Contains the funniest dad and son out "fishing" in the rowboat at night scene ever filmed. I can still hear the foghorns. Despite all the corniness, its all somehow...so...mesmerizing.... Was the above comment useful to you? 4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :- simultaneously funny and haunting neo-noir, 3 September 2003 9/10 Author: chrisdfilm from los angeles, ca. There are a lot of people who really hate this movie. Then strangely they go on and on detailing the things that bother them about it but that they also find fascinating and relentlessly hypnotic. It's unfortunate that people are so rigid in their definition of what makes a 'good' movie. Norman Mailer is by no means a terrible director. He actually does a very credible and commendable job of adapting his own novel to the screen. The dialogue is at times overblown and purplish, but it is never boring and frequently it's downright brilliant. Every performer acquits themselves well, even Debra Sandlund as Patty Laureine, Wings Hauser as the sociopathic macho police chief and John Bedford Lloyd as the eccentric, messed-up millionaire, all of whom can be accused of overacting. But ultimately their performances are completely in tune with their insane characters and draw us into a nasty labyrinth of twisted emotions and nightmarish memories. Ryan O'Neal actually gives one of his finest performances as an alcoholic loser who has messed up his life and who is so prone to blackouts, he's not even sure if he's killed someone. Lawrence Tierney is excellent as his tough guy dad who helps him make sense of the chaos in their small-shut-up-for-the-winter-and-consequently-spooky-as-hell Provincetown coastal neighborhood. Isabella Rossellini is also great in what appears to be an, at first impression, thankless role, but who in fact turns out to be the character who gets the last word and the best revenge. The great thing about this film is it manages to have its cake and eat it, too. It's not only an at times very creepy modern film noir, it's also a frequently hilarious black comedy. Also, contrary to some people's perceptions, the film has a complex narrative structure that pulls the viewer in, much like the best mysteries. If you go in not expecting a conventional mystery thriller but more of a cross between David Lynch, Roman Polanski, Jules Feiffer, Hal Ashby and maybe Arthur Penn(when he directed NIGHT MOVES), I guarantee you you will not be disappointed. Was the above comment useful to you? 4 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :- Essential Viewing - a milestone, 9 August 2001 10/10 Author: hugoconductshugo (hugoconductshugo@yahoo.com) from Chicago, IL I always quote this as one of my two favorite movies (the other being "The Ninth Configuration"). Like that film, it's unpolished, awkward and brilliant. Ryan O'Neal, a brilliant empty vessel, as in "Barry Lyndon", is the perfect receptical for Mailer's essentially passive protagonist. Grotesque, awkwardly paced and fascinating, this should be considered manditory viewing. Mailer's hand is so heavy and the film feels so writerly that the experience is play-like and unusual. This exploratory quality is to be hugely prized (see "Kids", "Ninth Configuration", "Safe", "Dancer in the Dark" to see vastly different but equally praiseworthy examples of what can happen when Hollywood outsiders are allowed access to decent budgets and distribution). Was the above comment useful to you? 1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :- supremely awful, like its author, 31 March 2006 Author: vandino1 from United States Norman Mailer used to mean something, literary-wise. He was a Big Noise back in the fifties and sixties trying to be the heir apparent to his hero Hemingway, but since Mailer was really just a small-statured city boy with no interest in the outdoors he resorted to games of thumb-wrestling and head butting men (and assaulting women) instead of hunting and traveling. Like this movie, Mailer is a juvenile, woman-hating, gay-hating, faux-tough guy obviously obsessed with his fragile masculinity. Decades of hype and bad writing and activities (including the notorious Abbott disaster) have reduced his noisy reputation to virtual silence. He has become as pathetic as this movie, based on another one of his terrible novels. Granted this film is more coherent than his previous directorial attempts way-back-when (i.e. 'Wild 90,' 'Maidstone') there is still no reason to give it any more credibility considering its supreme awfulness. Of course, there IS the 'Showgirls'-like aroma of a risible good time to be had for those inclined to cheer on the execrable disasters of filmmakers who thought they were making something worthwhile and were so very wrong. For other viewers this is a stupefying experience mirrored by the consistently haggard look of Ryan O'Neal throughout. Like Spike Lee, Mailer MUST include his obsessions on screen. Ala Spike, consider this a 'Norman Mailer Joint.' That means you will hear men grousing to other men about "being men" and "not being fags" and how spiteful and cruel all women are, and it will be spoken in purplish film-noir-meets-gym-locker-room dialogue (my favorite: "Don't tickle my stick.") There will be countless scenes of women degrading themselves for no reason or men complaining/crying because those ruthless harpies have emasculated them. Since it's directed by a rank amateur, naturally the actors look either lost or unhinged. In short, this film, like its author, is an embarrassment. Was the above comment useful to you? 1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :- Norman Mailer's wildly uneven but often provocative rhapsody on noir themes, 21 October 2002 7/10 Author: bmacv from Western New York When Lawrence Tierney utters the line that gives Tough Guys Don't Dance its title, he evokes the stoic, hard-boiled codes of post-war noir, felt in films he made like Born to Kill, The Bodyguard and The Devil Thumbs A Ride. And when Isabella Rossellini shows up, she suggests David Lynch's kooky and subversive Reagan-era suspense movies like Blue Velvet. These homages mark two of the many streams that flow into Norman Mailer's rhapsody on themes of sexual intrigue, multi-tiered duplicity and garish murders. (Mailer directed his movie from his 1984 novel.) It's a baroque contraption that comes close to self-parody - and may even cross the threshold - but neither is it just a fling at film making by a celebrity author intoxicated by his own publicity. The forlorn setting is Cape Cod under the sign of Sagittarius: the dunes and the bars empty, and the Atlantic is choppy and gunmetal grey. Ex-con Ryan O'Neal (his boyish superstardom well behind him) has been drinking heavily since his wealthy if white-trash wife (Debra Sandlund) left him; one morning he wakes to find a tattoo on his arm and his jeep's upholstery soaked in blood. Circumstances lead him to a burrow where he stashes his marijuana harvest; in it he finds the severed heads of his wife and a woman he had picked up (along with her boyfriend) a few nights before. The clues he starts piecing together lead him back down paths that wend through his own none-too-savory past. There's the out-of-town `couple' with whom he had spent a hard-drinking night (Frances Fisher and R. Patrick Sullivan); a woman he had once loved (Rossellini) now married to Provincetown's sadistic Chief of Police (Wings Hauser); another woman he had met when she was married to a wife-swapping Christian preacher (Penn Jillette) and who later wed a rich, spoiled Southern boy (John Bedford Lloyd) then, ultimately, O'Neal, whom she recently left. Helping him find his way is his gruff, cancer-ridden father (Tierney). What plot line there is hangs on cocaine (maybe) and several millions, but that's but a pretext for Mailer to worry the preoccupations, even obsessions, which crop up again and again in his work, most notably the yin/yang of eroticism and violence. The women come across as predatory sirens but end up being almost beside the point - they're prizes for sexual competition between males, conflict that shades into edgy attraction, right up to taunting flirtation. (The movie is loaded with homosexual references, generally pejorative - the bisexual boyfriend is even given the name `Pangborn' - and the continuum of couplings, both on screen and in the back story, results in a very kinky daisy chain in which everybody save Tierney might just as well have slept with everybody else. Mailer comes close to suggesting that two men who have slept with the same woman share an implicit homosexual relationship themselves.) Coming to Tough Guys Don't Dance expecting anything like a conventional suspense film (even something `post-' or `neo-') is to court disappointment. One comes for Mailer, who's like the little girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead: When he's good, he's very, very good, but when he's bad, he's horrid. How the proportions weight out in this movie can be argued, but adventurous and provocative nuggets nestle among some very bad choices (the acting runs the gamut from rather good to execrable, often within the same performance). Caveat spectator: wildly uneven and sometimes grotesquely macho, Tough Guys Don't Dance is far from negligible. Was the above comment useful to you? 1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :- Only for Mailer imagery fans, 7 November 2001 7/10 Author: akhilles84 from Turku,Finland *** This comment may contain spoilers *** This is a hard film to stomach.It has a lot of intense,extreme scenes of sex,violence and obscurity.Ryan O'Neal could have done better.Wings Hauser outshines all in his role of sadistic,sex crazy chauvinist police officer.Who at the end turns insane.And thats what he isnt alone in.There are even more obscure characters here,like southern reverend Big Stoop and his "friendly" ex-wife Patty.They create a spiral of sex and intrigues which ends in suicide of the first and death of the other. All in all,a movie every sado-masochist would love to own.For normal people-a torturingly mad 2 hour experience. Was the above comment useful to you? 1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :- Painful in the Extreme, 11 January 1999 1/10 Author: SaintNo1 from Canberra Norman Mailer is one of America's great writers, however, he came spectacularly unstuck when scripting and directing this movie. The dialogue is appalling - it might have worked on the printed page but it's embarrassingly bad when spoken. The direction is flat as a pancake, much of the acting is over the top, and usually coupled with bad Southern accents, and the plot descends into ridiculous melodrama almost immediately. It would be totally forgettable except for the presence of the radiant Isabella Rossellini - just fast forward to her scenes or don't watch it in the first place. You'll be missing nothing. Was the above comment useful to you? 2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :- Nor Can They Direct, 5 February 2003 Author: patrickboyle-1 (patrickboyle@patrickboyle.net) from Oakland I read the book last year. After so many years of disappointments I tried once again to find a piece by Norman Mailer that had the impact on me of "The Naked and the Dead". Alas "Tough Guys" is not that book. However it is a genuine hoot. A hard boiled mystery with a rapid succession of over the top scenes and characters. Not by any means an important book but a a great light (or lite) read. The movie however is just a mess with the exception of Wings Hauser. I was charmed that Mr. Hauser the King of the B Movies finally got a part that let him eat the scenery. John Bedford Lloyd is a problem as the protagonist's effete and ineffective rich college buddy. Lloyd is a big guy and a superior actor. He has been type cast as the the big guy in "The Abyss" and several other roles. He towers over poor little Ryan O'Neal. The nerdy Lloyd character was supposed to have always looked up to the physical O'Neal character. Mailer the director wouldn't change the lines written by Mailer the writer. Poor Lloyd spends all of his scenes hunched over trying to look smaller. It's even worse than the Shawshank Redemption where a 6'5" Tim Robbins tried to be the small weak guy the other cast members talk about. We keep hearing that most of directing is casting but why do we get Peter O'Toole a foot to tall for Lawrence and Mel Gibson a foot to short for Wallace? Was the above comment useful to you? Warning: For Intelligent and Advanced Film Buffs Only!, 10 March 2007 7/10 Author: AlanSquier from United States Okay, now that I have your attention, I don't guarantee that you will rate this the 7/10 I do, even if you qualify as an intelligent and advanced film buff. However, I do believe you will find something to chew on here. It's written and directed by noted author Norman Maileer. And it's tough in every meaning of the word. The rough plot sounds like a rather typical noir. An excessively drinking author given to memory blackouts doesn't know if he committed a murder or not. Believe me, it's not that simple and Mailer takes us down a long winding and convoluted path before we know the whole story. At times, it seems ludicrous, and although I disagree with the Razzie noms it got, I understand. This is the type of movie which some will find inexorably bad. However, it weaves a spell and the tough will stay with it because it's addictive. You will laugh at inappropriate times and groan sometimes, and yet the very serious film buff will continue watching it, and be glad he/she did. And I do believe that many will find this rewarding although certainly not unflawed. Maybe Mailer wanted it flawed. As others mentioned, Wings Hauser is the perfect actor in this. However, Ryan O'Neal gave this his all, and veteran B film noir actor Lawrence Tierney also adds to this. Some will love it; some will hate it. I did neither, but I did enjoy it. There was a point, the chain connecting the characters in their sex lives and in the chain of violence. Love it or hate it, I suspect you will remember this one and not consider it a waste of time. Was the above comment useful to you? Ridiculous, 18 December 2004 Author: (dj_bassett) from Philadelphia *** This comment may contain spoilers *** Outside of some nice location shooting in and around Provincetown, this is just awful, incompetently made from start to finish. Ryan O'Neal, in one long lugubrious flashback, tries to explain to his Dad why there's severed heads in his basement and a tattoo on his arm. The problem all started, you see, when he answered a SCREW ad..... Bad acting, ranging from stiff and wooden (O'Neal, Rosselini) to over the top (Tierney, who nevertheless gets a couple of good lines in, and Hauser, hamming it up as a semi-psychotic sheriff). Prose as purple as all get-out, probably inevitable when you consider Mailer's involvement. Incompetently put together, mostly told in flashback for reasons I can't understand, other than Mailer couldn't figure out a better way to get the information in. A story that doesn't make a lick of sense, although future scholars of Mailer will have to see this to see all of Mailer's issues dramatized: mostly women as either whores or maternal mothers who entrap you and faux Hemingway macho romanticism. Laugh out-loud funny at some points, although I'm not sure if it has enough brio to recommend it to fans of bad movies, as not a lot really happens, all in all. Better just to avoid it. (Less)