Verse
Carson, Mike
Tough Guys Don't Dance is the ne plus ultra.of Norman Mailer's degeneration. The film represents Mailer's second real attempt at direct' ing (he shot the underground Maidstone in 1970). This...
...Life—in extreme situations—eludes categories...
...The photography 566...
...Pardon me if I categorize it as pathological, misogynistic, and plain stupid...
...But the film is a tangle of poses, manic black jokes, and nonstop foul language...
...His evolution toward journalistic fiction has not served (in Carlyle's manner) to identify the timeless and universal ivl the everyday, but rather to mark his own superficial vision...
...After The Naked and the Dead, what will live on when all the hubbub subsides...
...The local police chief is a a former Green Beret, Vietnam vet, sadist, and machete freak who wants to be president...
...Mailer made his reputation with a fine combat novel...
...But the combination of that early success, later literary lionization, the shadow cast by Hemingway, and the cockiness perhaps linked to his Harvard degree seems to have stunted Mailer's growth as a writer...
...Tough guys don't disdain only dancing, but manners...
...the problem is, Mailer thinks he does...
...Throw in the brooding pre-Raphaelite beauty, dark-browed Isabella Rosellini (Ingrid Bergman's daughter) as an Italian American femme fatale, and two blowsy blondes (one a Southern witch) who get their heads cut off, and you get the range of Mailer's personae from Sociology 101...
...Worse, Mailer betrays his ends by his means, absurd categories of characterization concocted from Tennessee Williams, Hemingway, and cocaine...
...Such a declaration of independence from cliche sounds like one itself...
...Ryan O'Neal plays a failed writer, an ex-football star at Exeter, now given to alcohol, drug deals, and equal doses of promiscuity and guilt...
...His ex-schoolboy pal, Wordleigh (John Bedford Lloyd) drawls"out elegant cynicism and despair inbetween committing murders...
...At extraordinary moments, we don't always know if we're in a tragedy or a farce...
...Mailer reminds me of the lawyer in All the President's Men who kept saying to Robert Redford: "I just have nothing to say...
...Of Tough Guys, Mailer has said,' 'I want my film to' thrive in a no-man's land between a murder mystery, a suspense tale, a film of horror—and a comedy of manners...
...This film is better, and has some exaggeratedly offbeat moments as half-serious, half-spoofy film noir...
...Odd aspects of the film redeem it slightly...
Vol. 114 • October 1987 • No. 17
