Crazy Love
Directed by Dan Klores
Crazy Love is a documentary that tries to turn a violently abusive and sadistic relationship into dark comedy. In the late-1950s, crooked accident lawyer Burt Pugach was having an affair with 21-year-old Linda Riss, 10 years his junior. When Riss gave up waiting for Pugach to get a divorce, she started seeing another man. Pugach, upon hearing Riss had gotten engaged, and in an “act of passion,” hired three thugs to throw acid in her face, nearlyblinding her and permanently disfiguring the once beautiful young woman. The message was, literally, “If I can’t have her, no one can.” The story was of course picked up and exploited by the vilest papers of the time.
In 1974, Pugach was given parole after serving 15 years in prison. He wasted no time resurrecting the parasitic media’s interest and proceeded to propose to Riss on television. In a turn of events that’s equal parts pathetic and masochistic, Riss, then living on her own, without any family to support her, and with no social life or career prospects, accepted.
What should be seen as a stomach-churning example of patriarchy at its worst is instead portrayed in Crazy Love as a “love knows no bounds” tale-for-the-ages. This is reprehensible. Documentarians lately seem to pick the worst times to be objective. For director Dan Klores to not explicitly condemn Burt Pugach’s pathological violence for what it is—misogyny at its most extreme and flagrantly despicable—makes Klores a misogynist himself. Stalking is criminal behavior; taking a woman’s eyesight out of jealousy is unforgivable. That this ill-fated couple is for some reason still married—despite Pugach recently having another bout with the law for making similar threats to a mistress—changes none of this.
Crazy Love is tabloid journalism at its most base and vulgar, with the same moral bankruptcy as the media outlets that turned this tragedy into grotesque copy in the first place. When hack filmmakers run out of ideas, this is what we get. On top of it all, the film’s structure is patchy and safe, there’s no directorial style and its over-use of pop songs is just plain annoying.
