But enough pussyfooting: Let's get to the booze, broads, bodies, and bullets. You know, the good stuff. In perhaps his single greatest bad performance, a ghostly pale, perpetually hung-over Ryan O'Neal stars as a bartender, writer, chauffeur, drug dealer, and full-time fuck-up in the midst of one hellacious downward spiral. His days blur together into a dispiriting orgy of drinking, fucking, and blackouts, broken up by the occasional discovery of decapitated heads and accidental tattoo acquisition. Oh, and he might be a murderer. Or he might be getting set up by a psychotic, weed-addled small-town police chief (Wings Hauser) with a closet full of skeletons and a disconcerting habit of waving around a giant machete while stoned and drunk off his ass.
Or the guilty party might be a foppish bisexual multimillionaire dandy with an irresistible jones for the low life and a grudge against O'Neal for stealing his party-girl wife (Debra Sandlund). O'Neal and Sandlund, incidentally, met when O'Neal and his then-girlfriend (Isabella Rossellini) answered a personal ad for orgy partners placed in Screw magazine by Sandlund and her then-husband (magician Penn Jillette), a group-sex-loving, fantastically well-endowed preacher named "Big Stoop." During my first viewing, I was thinking "You know, this movie isn't anywhere near as much fun as a film with an orgy involving Isabella Rossellini, Ryan O'Neal, and Penn Jillette as a group-sex-loving, fantastically well-endowed Southern preacher named 'Big Stoop' should be." The second time around, however, I dug the surreal incongruity of it all, particularly the preposterousness of the words "He must have the longest cock in Christendom," coming out of Ingrid Bergman's daughter's impeccably sculpted mouth. So… Jillette, O'Neal, and Rossellini: Least likely cinematic orgy ever? Can anyone think of a combination more transcendently random?
Mailer caught flack throughout the years for his perceived sexism, but this film nobly depicts womanhood in all its infinite variety and boundless majesty. The film's strong, empowered female characters range in personality and disposition from cum-crazed cock-sluts to jizz-hungry fuck monkeys to sex-obsessed orgy enthusiasts. I'm surprised Mailer didn't receive some sort of award from NOW for these loving portrayals of womyn.
In addition to slipping the debauched likes of Rossellini and Sandlund the old salami surprise, O'Neal makes sweet, sweet love with a coke-addled former porn star turned society wife (Frances Farmer) while her emasculated husband watches in horror. What initially struck me as bad pulp and vulgarity minus any redeeming energy or vitality eventually came together as a gothic, tongue-in-cheek parody of blood-splattered tough-guy melodrama.
I even came to love that Mailer's he-men and she-sluts use words like "screw," "bang," "broad," and "dame" without a hint of irony or self-consciousness. Tough Guys traffics in the lively patois of the scuzzy barroom. It's locker-room banter with a literary bent and caveman swagger. Here are some particularly juicy snippets of hard-boiled banter, Norman Mailer style:
"Certain dames ought to wear a T-shirt that says 'Hang around, I'll make a cocksucker out of you.'"
"You always worried I'd turn out queer."
"I did my three years in the slammer standing up. Nobody made me a punk."
"My blood itself was turning mean."
"You trying to wake up all the ghosts in Helltown?"
"My pussy hair was bright gold in high school, until I went out and scorched it with the football team."
"My head's been peculiar lately. I have blackouts. I hallucinate."
"Have you ever lived with the foul spirit that comes along when you lose a wife?"
"What makes surgeons happy? To cut people up and get paid for it! That's happiness!"
"You Yankees got tongues like tallywackers!"
"Mr. Regency and I make out five times a night. That's why I call him Mr. Five."
"Your knife. Is in. My dog."
"What if I'm prey to spirits?"
"I say we deep-six the heads."
"Oh criminy."
And this exchange:
"Life gives a man two balls. Use 'em. It's a rare day I don't bang two women. As a matter of fact, I don't sleep too well unless I get that second hump in. Both sides of my nature are obliged to express themselves."
"Tell me, what are your two sides?"
"The enforcer and the maniac."
"Who do we have the honor of addressing?"
"You've never met the maniac."
And this one:
"I made you come 16 times in a night."
"Not one of them was good."
"That's because you've got no wommmmmmb!"
Hauser delivers the "enforcer and the maniac" and "I made you come 16 times in a night!" lines with a wide-eyed, lunatic abandon that's utterly irresistible. A veteran of countless shitty B and Z movies you've never heard of, he looks and acts like the demon-spawn of Gary Busey and Rutger Hauer. It's a performance pitched at just the right level of frothing hysteria.
I was even won over by O'Neal's weak, wan lead performance. As a malicious sort of cosmic joke, Mailer seems to have deliberately undercut his lead actor at every turn. He made the protagonist a passive, weak-willed, pathetic shell of a man who turns white with fright at the first sign of danger, then cast the great tough-guy character actor Lawrence Tierney as O'Neal's rough-hewn dad, so O'Neal would look even more effete by comparison. Here's the apex/nadir of O'Neal's performance, in a notorious scene O'Neal reportedly begged Mailer, to cut but that he sadistically preserved for posterity:
Tough Guys Don't Dance works best as a darkly comic horror-tinged melodrama about the emptiness of excess and the soul-crushing costs of pursuing mindless pleasure. It's populated by some of the most repellent hedonists this side of Rules Of Attraction, and written and directed with tongue firmly in cheek.
When I look back at the first half of this essay, I want to punch the fey asshole that wrote it right in his smug fucking face. Then, after he gradually regains consciousness, we can down some Jack and go out looking for trouble. Oh God! Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! I think Mailer, that crafty old dog, may just be having his wicked way with my fragile psyche after all.
One final note: My Year Of Flops is going biweekly! I love you beautiful people so damn much, I want to bring the Flopization to you twice a month from here on out. So if you've submitted suggestions or would like to do so, you're now twice as likely to see your nominee get its 15 minutes of cyber-fame. I might hate it. I might love it. Heck, I might even hate it, then love it. That's been known to happen. It's also what makes the roughly 2 percent of life that isn't wholly predictable so wonderfully unpredictable. Today, for example, I am firmly, 100 percent against kicking Labradoodle puppies. Who can say with any certainty how I'll feel about it tomorrow?
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco Turned Secret Success
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