Tough Guys Don't Dance movie review (1987)
I will not reveal the owner of the head for two reasons: first, because it would be unfair to reveal the plot, and second, because although I have read the novel and seen the movie and even visited the location while the filming was under way, I cannot remember whose head it was. There is a press release I easily could consult for the name, but that would be cheating. It says something about this film that the women characters, played by such memorable actresses as Isabella Rossellini, blond newcomer Debra Sandlund and intriguing Frances Fisher, play people not nearly as memorable as themselves.
Something comes back to me now. The Sandlund character, Patty Lareine, is a hillbilly once married to a preacher. The O'Neal character and his girlfriend met them through a singles ad and engaged in a weekend of sexual abandon. That led in a complicated way to the more recent events after Patty Lareine left the preacher to marry the hero's rich friend from prep school, Wardley Meeks III, who now appears on the scene after a crisis of identify.
This is as confusing as "The Big Sleep" (1946). The characters come and go, in the past and the present, and their severed heads appear and disappear. It is almost as if Mailer does not much care to take inventory. The film's center of gravity is in Madden's befuddled and paranoid head and much depends on a night he cannot remember, a night when he gained a tattoo and perhaps committed a murder.
He drinks and makes cautious inquiries and tries to determine from people's actions what they think he did. The local police chief calls him in, for reasons not entirely clear. The inventory of heads in his stash changes from one, to two, to none. He can hardly bear to look to see whose heads they are. He cannot understand who knows the location of his stash and the identities of women from his past and, even more so, who would want to kill them. Then there is the question of the strange couple from California, who turned up in the local inn shopping for real estate, drank with him and turned up missing, their car abandoned, after the night he cannot remember.
