Crimes of Passion

Released one week before Body Double, Crimes of Passion is the movie for everyone who wished Brian De Palma's 1984 erotic thriller was a whole lot more highbrow and a whole lot less fun. Kathleen Turner, who had made her debut in an actually sexy movie, 1981's Body Heat, and proved herself a versatile and bankable movie star in 1984's Romancing the Stone, stars as Joanna Crane. Joanna is a successful fashion designer by day who moonlights as a prostitute named China Blue in the evenings. Anthony Perkins plays one of her regular patrons, a poppers-sniffing fire-and-brimstone preacher named Reverend Peter Shayne, who wants to save her soul, or kill her, or both.

This high-class piece of trash comes from the outrageous and controversial English director Ken Russell—who had followed up his Oscar-nominated 1963 romantic drama Women in Love with the notorious, locked-away-untill-this-year The Devils, as well as The Who's rock opera Tommy and Paddy Chayefsky's psychedelic sci-fi Altered States. His psychosexual drama attempts to expose something about religion, marriage, and societal hangups, but unlike most of Russell's movies, it forgets to be either funny, classy, or outrageous. Unlike Body Double, which goes for broke and doesn't even attempt to imply any socially redeeming value, Crimes of Passion falls into the common '80s and '90s trap of too many erotic movies that tried to offset their prurient qualities with pretension and serious messaging—going way too far in the wrong direction (and, in this case, forgetting the part about the serious messaging entirely).

The attempt at highfalutency didn't stop the MPAA from giving this picture an 'X' rating. Russell re-cut and re-submitted the film several times but was unsuccessful in getting an "R." After considering the possibility that this picture could resuscitate the X-rating back to its intended meaning, Russell submitted to a fourth round of cuts that he felt permanently damaged the story, and that version of the movie was released in theaters. I don't know what he felt the missing footage did to make writer/producer Barry Sandler's inept story into some kind of deep character study because we all saw the unrated version, and it's just as bad. Crimes of Passion was one of the first Home Video releases to come out in two forms: the theatrical cut and the original unrated version submitted to the MPAA. Anchor Bay put a significantly longer Director's Cut on BluRay much later.

If the sex scenes are meant to be sexy (which I think they are at least some of the time), they have the inverse effect. Russell frequently edits these heightened but not especially stylized encounters with flash cuts to Japanese lithograph erotica, which is just pretentious. Worse is when China Blue is having rough sex with a violent cop, and we get flash cuts to still photographs of incidents of police brutality. Much of the movie's screen time is devoted to the home life of an unhappy middle-class electronics store owner (John Laughlin) who also does surveillance work in his spare time. He is ostensibly the protagonist of this movie, discovering Joanna's double life early on and falling in love with her after discovering his unhappy, frigid wife (Annie Potts) has been faking her orgasms.

Coming out when it did, Crimes of Passion can't help but draw comparisons to Body Double, and not only because they both explore sexual obsession and are set in part in the underworld of porn and the sex trade (and both movies suddenly turn into music videos at one point). Both films have a bright, harsh but colorful '80s visual style, but where Stephen H. Burum's lighting and rich, deep-focus LA exteriors help give De Palma's film the dream-like quality it tries for, the cinematography in Crimes of Passion by Dick Bush (The Blood on Satan's Claw, Sorcerer, One Trick Pony) only serves to accentuate this film's artificiality. Bush did this to great effect two years earlier in Blake Edwards' Victor/Victoria, which was shot on lavish sets meant to look like a beautifully rendered fantasy version of Paris in the 1930s. I guess one could say Bush and Russell are trying for something similar—giving this movie the grungy, fake look of a porno, but that's not what they end up with. Musically, both films have distinctive earworm scores, but where Body Double's Pino Donaggio spins hypnotic Tangerine Dream-inspired soundscapes that lull the viewer into a liminal state, Rick Wakeman of the Prog-Rock band Yes crafts an intentionally off-putting score for Crimes. Wakeman's music mostly consists of variations on the same unpleasant seven-note melody repeatedly played in various styles and musical genres, including a shrill pop song with lyrics for the aforementioned music video this movie briefly turns into. Wakeman is almost doing what John Williams did so brilliantly in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, scoring that movie with seemingly infinite renderings of the title song, but this is not done for any whimsical effect here; in Crimes, the musical motif seems repeated for the express purpose of alienating the viewer.

Russell seems to indulge the whims of his actors to far too great an extent, leading to one of Perkins's most unhinged performances that, while I can't say is good, is certainly something to see. Turner made it through the experience unscathed, with even critics who panned the movie applauding the risks she took in doing the role, though Crimes of Passion is hardly one of the gifted actress's best performances. Though not much talked about these days and almost never revived, this remained an oft-discussed and frequently written-about movie throughout the 1980s, a decade where studios produced a lot of content that served a seemingly insatiable pre-internet lust for R-rated mainstream features that pushed the MPAA to its limits yet still didn't seem to satisfy anyone. An interesting 1984 time capsule, for sure.