Crimes of Passion (1984)
First screened and reviewed in early 1991 / Most recently screened in March 2025
Director: Ken Russell. Cast: John Laughlin, Kathleen Turner, Anthony Perkins, Annie Potts, Bruce Davison, Yvonne McCord, Janice Renney, John G. Scanlon, John Rose, Louise Sorel, Randall Brady. Screenplay: Barry Sandler. In Brief:
Turner gives her all, saddled with weak co-lead, maybe over-trusting Russell. Was script weak or did he sink it?
VOR:③
For the most part, I can't stand by the execution, but I grasp that it's gambling on crassness as style and it's taking unafraid chances.
Crimes of Passion opened a week before Body Double, and it's kind of amazing that neither would run unopposed for Tackiest Foolywang of 1984, or even of October 1984. Wanna watch an actress do her best with the punchy, incoherently written, preyed upon, gaudily styled sex bomb she's been asked to play? Have fun. Wanna see a male lead whose nebulous screen presence just keeps dissolving further, like cotton candy after you spit on it? Here's your lucky day. Ken Russell and Brian De Palma both directed just enough good movies that I can understand where their devotees are coming from, even as they've both made enough plainly bad ones that, to me, the line between adherents and apologists gets blurry really fast.
I am sure that Crimes of Passion means to thematize rampant tastelessness in the U.S., and how both our sexual and religious fervors can slide easily into pornographic chintz. At moments, the movie gets there with something like an orchestrated point of view, but mostly it just is tasteless and chintzy, and stranded somewhere between too porny and insufficiently so. (The Radley Metzger version of this movie would almost certainly be a step up.) The best thing going for the film's knockoff "argument" about embracing rather than repressing desire is that, as addled and unpleasant as that path quickly becomes, it's a lot less tedious than the Sawdust Cereal alternatives of the middle-class workplace or the suburban homespace. Russell can barely wake up enough to stage a facsimile of the former that doesn't feel like a half-constructed set or, in one late scene, a blatant burglary of Klute. As far as the latter, every scene suggests the marital bed-death storyline could and should have been cut altogether, thus releasing Annie Potts from very possibly the worst-written version of the nagging, lonely, inhibited housewife I've ever seen. And if you're feeling sorry for her, just wait till you find out that Kathleen Turner probably committed to this movie back when Jeff Bridges was still on board as her costar, and imagine her discovery that she'd in fact be acting opposite John Laughlin, a milky amalgam of a closer-cropped Michael Landon and a more rabbity Ryan Reynolds, melding their different species of sexlessness.
I first saw Crimes of Passion at 14, in the early 1990s, at what felt to me like the era of Turner's peak cultural cachet though it was actually the icy slope of her fast Hollywood decline. I thought it would be a serious acting vehicle but also, based on the VHS cover, a disclosure of some secrets about human sexuality. I remember feeling pretty positive I hadn't learned anything. 33 years later, I clicked back over on the Criterion Channel ready for a fresh take and discovered that I've aged but the movie hasn't—in the not-great sense that it's as adolescent as ever. Grade:C–
Awards:
Los Angeles Film Critics Association: Best Actress (Turner, also cited for Romancing the Stone)
