Plot
Writer, ex-con and 40-something bottle-baby Tim Madden, who is prone to blackouts, awakens from a two-week bender to discover a pool of blood in his car, a blond woman's severed head in his marijuana stash, and the new Provincetown, Massachusetts police chief, Captain Luther Regency, shacked up with his former girlfriend Madeleine.
As his father Dougy helps try to unravel the mystery, Madden is dogged by the psychotic Capt. Regency, who has it in for him because a car crash that he was involved in with Madeline has left her unable to have children. Flashing back, Madden remembers the time when he encouraged Madeline to swing with a Li'l Abnerish couple from down South, the fundamentalist preacher Big Stoop and his Daisy Mae-ish wife, Patty Lareine, whose ad Tim had come across in Screw magazine. It is on the trip back that the car crash occurs, Madeline incensed along the way that Tim has so enjoyed Patty Lareine's charms.
Except for his father, who is dying of cancer, Tim suspects everyone, including Patty Lareine, multi-millionaire prep-school pal Wardley Meeks III — and even himself — of murder. Patty Lareine had left Big Stoop, married Wardley, left him in a messy divorce which netted her a rich cash settlement, and in turn married Tim, whom she fancied. Patty Lareine disappears, and Tim goes on his fatal bender that has left his memory in shards after receiving a letter from Madeline informing him that her husband is having an affair with his wife.
Tim remembers his assignation in the local tavern's parking lot with the blond porn star Jessica Pond, while her effete husband Lonnie Pangborn watched from the sidelines, distraught. It was Jessica's head in the Hefty bag with his grass, but soon another head turns up in his marijuana stash, that of Patty Lareine.
We eventually learn that she and Wardley, a bisexual skewed towards the gay side, had been involved in a massive cocaine deal, one that also involved Pond and Pangborn, who are also missing. Will Tim be able to get to the bottom of the mystery and save himself from another stretch in stir? As Dougy reminds him, "Tough guys don't dance," and Tim has been doing everything but the Charlston in his attempt to keep ahead of the forces closing in on him.
Read more about this topic: Tough Guys Don't Dance (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)