SOURCE: Leeds, Barry H. “Tough Guy Goes to Hollywood.” In Take Two: Adapting the Contemporary American Novel to Film, edited by Barbara Tepa Lupack, pp. 154-68. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Leeds discusses the film adaptation of Norman Mailer's 1984 novel, Tough Guys Don't Dance, characterizing the cinematic version of this work an artistically superior work to the original.

Norman Mailer's relationship with the world of film has grown throughout his career from passive and distant to active and quite intimate.

The earliest adaptations of his work—the movie versions of The Naked and the Dead (1958) and An American Dream (1966)—are quite awful. While both films have many weaknesses, the primary failure in each case lies in the respective conclusions, which dramatically reverse Mailer's intended vision.

In The Naked and the Dead (1948), Mailer's celebrated first novel, the liberal, Harvard-educated Lieutenant Hearn struggles...