Cine-Trash

Tough Guys Don’t Dance (Norman Mailer, 1988)
by William Ham

Now, here’s a chunka forehead-slappin’ filmic spuh with some local color to boot! Mailer, the legendary pugiliterary lion, has always had a jones for celluloid. He spat out a trio of disjointed, improvisatory “art” flix back in the sixties (the last of which, Maidstone (1968), is most notable for the actual footage of Normie nearly biting Rip Torn’s ear off after one of Rip’s improvs drew a little auteur blood), but since then has restricted his cinemania to helming this big-screen bastardization of his mid-eighties potboiler/rentpayer. (Haven’t read it? There’s at least one copy in every used bookstore in America.) Ryan O’Neal (no mean scrapper himself – just ask his son) plays Mailer’s alter-egocentric protagonist, a Providencetown writer who awakens from a bender with a mean hangover, a new tattoo, and oh yeah, a woman’s head buried next to his pot stash. (A bad situation, since as you know, murder carries with it penalties almost as bad as possession in this state.) A dizzying attempt at reconstruction follows, as he wends his way through confused memories and equally confused performances in his search for the truth. I won’t give away the ending, since, from what I can tell, Mailer doesn’t either. Probably not the point anyway – existential machismo is its own reward. Some of this is just too boring to be fun, but the scene where O’Neal stands on a sand dune, turns to the camera and cries “Oh God! Oh man! Oh god oh man oh god oh man (etc.)” while Mailer’s camera spins out of control has to be some kind of high point in cinematic ineptitude. File this one next to Maximum Overdrive on the shelf reserved for writers who should stick to writing 1,500-page novels and stay the hell away from the camera. Also starring Isabella Rossellini, Lawrence Tierney, and Clarence Williams III – oh, how the Mod Squad has fallen.