Tough Guys Don’t Dance ** (1987, Ryan O’Neal, Isabella Rossellini, Lawrence Tierney, Wings Hauser, Debra Stipe) – Classic Movie Review 10,757

Ryan O’Neal does well as a blacking-out alcoholic writer, who may have killed during a drunken bender, in Norman Mailer’s intriguing 1987 movie Tough Guys Don’t Dance. Wings Hauser scores as the psychotic new Provincetown police chief. 

In difficult circumstances, Ryan O’Neal does well as a blacking-out alcoholic writer, 40-something ex-con Tim Madden, who may have killed during a drunken bender, in this wobbly but always intriguing 1987 movie Tough Guys Don’t Dance, directed by its writer, Norman Mailer, based on his own novel.

Norman Mailer won the Worst Director award at the 1988 Golden Raspberry Awards, tied with Elaine May for Ishtar. Cruel, but the film was an easy target as a box office bomb, actually both films were.

Tim Madden’s father Dougy visits him and helps him to try to unravel the mystery after he wakes from a two-week bender to find a pool of blood in his car and the severed head of a blonde woman in his marijuana stash.

Tim’s party-obsessed wife Patty Lareine (Debra Sandlund) left him a month earlier. Dougy tells Tim he has stopped chemotherapy because tough guys don’t dance.

Lawrence Tierney is great as O’Neal’s brusque dad Dougy and Isabella Rossellini is an asset, too, as vengeful femme fatale Madeleine Regency, Tim Madden’s former girlfriend, and Wings Hauser scores as the psychotic new Provincetown police chief, Captain Alvin Luther Regency, who is now married to Madeleine.

Tough Guys Don’t Dance could seem infuriating and pretentious, possibly frustrating as it defies slotting into the darkly comic neo noir crime thriller it seems to be, but its weirdness makes it a bit of a one-off – fortunately.

Also in the cast are Debra Stipe [Debra Sandlund], Wings Hauser, John Bedford Lloyd, Penn Jillette, Frances Fisher, R Patrick Sulllivan, John Snyder and Clarence Williams III.

Mailer’s script was revised in rewrites by Robert Towne, working as script doctor.

It was shot by cinematographer Mike Moyer on location in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

The soundtrack composed and conducted by regular David Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti is released on CD by Music Box Records.

The cinematography, locations and score are classy, and help to keep the film special, memorable even.

Inevitably, and sadly, it was a box office bomb, taking only $858,250, less than a fifth of its $5 million budget. More trouble for troubled Golan-Globus and The Cannon Group.

Gerald Dwight ‘Wings’ Hauser (December 12, 1947 – March 15, 2025)

Prolific character actor Wings Hauser appeared in more than 100 film and TV productions between 1967 and 2019. He received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Male for his role in Tough Guys Don’t Dance. He was the father of actor Cole Hauser.

He suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and died in Santa Monica on March 15, 2025.

The cast

The cast are Ryan O’Neal as Tim Madden, Isabella Rossellini as Madeleine Regency, Lawrence Tierney as Dougy Madden, Wings Hauser as Luther Regency, Debra Stipe [Debra Sandlund] as Patty Lareine, Penn Jillette as Big Stoop, John Bedford Lloyd as Wardley Meeks III, Frances Fisher as Jessica Pond, R Patrick Sulllivan, John Snyder and Clarence Williams III.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 10,757

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