Crimes of Passion
Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion is a neon-drenched fever dream that’s smarter than it has any right to be. It’s the kind of movie that could have been pure exploitation trash. Instead, it’s exploitation trash with a brain.
Kathleen Turner plays a double life with surgical precision. By day, she’s Joanna Crane, ice-queen fashion designer. By night, China Blue, a hooker working Hollywood Boulevard. She’s not hiding from the law. She’s hiding from herself.
John Laughlin is Bobby, a small-time electronics dealer moonlighting as a private eye to escape his sexless marriage. His wife Amy, played by Annie Potts, has lost interest. He’s hired to spy on Joanna, discovers her secret, and falls hard. They have sex. Something awakens in both of them. But Anthony Perkins’ sweaty, amyl-nitrite-huffing street preacher is watching too. He’s obsessed. He’s dangerous.
Russell bathes Turner’s hotel room in pulsing red and blue neon—red light district meets blue movie. This is a film about compartmentalized lives, about people so terrified of vulnerability they’ve fractured into pieces.
What surprised me most: the film’s refusal to take easy roads. A lesser movie would be a giallo thriller with a gloved killer. Instead, we get character study. Bobby brings Amy chocolates—except it’s raw vegetables because she’s dieting. Tone deaf, yes, but Amy’s no saint either, constantly belittling him in front of their kids. Nobody puts the children first. Dangerous narcissism, Russell suggests, is the real American dream.
Turner is perfect casting. Cynical and weary as China Blue, younger and vulnerable as Joanna. Watch her try to reassert dominance by sodomizing a cop with his nightstick after Perkins rattles her. When the cop spits on her afterward, she has no comeback. The mask cracks.
Perkins goes full-tilt crazy, his face permanently sheened with sweat, eyes manic and darting. Combined with Joanna’s last name “Crane,” the Psycho connection feels on the nose. But he sells it.
The film stumbles occasionally. A random music video plays on TV—Russell showing off before his actual music video career, but it adds nothing. The fashion boss gives Bobby a gun that’s never used. Bizarre. And I can’t get behind the toe-sucking scene. Not in a movie where everyone’s this sweaty.
But Russell uses sex as scalpel, not bludgeon. He’s probing arrested development, the terror of genuine connection. The film argues sex isn’t the end—it’s the means. Though knowing Russell’s love of phallic imagery, maybe it’s both.
Crimes of Passion works because it commits to honesty. It’s lurid and sweaty and sometimes ridiculous. It’s also surprisingly adult about sex, fear, and the lies we tell ourselves. Russell loves a phallus, sure, but he loves broken people more.