On Criterion, I watched Ken Russell's 1984 flamboyant erotic thriller Crimes of Passion, starring Kathleen Turner, John Laughlin, and Anthony Perkins. I've never seen any of Ken Russell's films, but I know of his reputation for making bizarre British films full of sex and kinky erotica and bold colors and utter weirdness, like The Lair of the White Worm, The Devils, and Altered States. I checked this out for Kathleen Turner mostly, and she delivered, with her signature sultry deep voice, a commitment to the role as a woman living a double life, as a fashion designer by day and a sex worker by night, switching between her civilian life as Joanna Crane and her late night life as China Blue, in a platinum wig and blue dress. There, in the seedy sex district of town, she performs as various characters in a hotel, flashing with neon lights from outside, whether it be sodomizing a police officer with his own nightstick in a scene that feels more like a Hellraiser pain and pleasure kind of violence, or teasing the "reverend" Shayne (Anthony Perkins, seemingly having lots of fun playing a deviant psychotic) with his need to "save" her and calling her a whore and sinful. Shayne himself is clearly not a man of the cloth, but more so a hypocritical misogynist psycho who preaches the Bible and religious piety, but patronizes peep shows and sex workers, and sharpens a metallic vibrator dildo as a potential weapon.
The film's plot in set in motion by Bobby Grady (John Laughlin), a middle class electronic store owner who moonlights doing surveillance work (and not subtly, given the large Super 8 camera he uses to spy right from his car window). He is approached by the owner of a fashion house suspects that his employee Joanna is selling their fashion designs to a competitor, and wants him to track her. She isn't committing treason, but Grady falls for her under her China Blue character, and as he and his wife (Annie Potts, underused in a dull role) are having martial issues and a lack of a sex life, he falls for Joanna, has one intense night of sex with her, and wants to know her as a person outside of her sex work persona, in a classic "save the sex worker" trope that some male clients may fall into under a deluded way of "rescuing" a woman from being a stripper or a prostitute. Joanna wants to keep her two lives separate from each other, prefers the mental compartmentalization of not confusing her sex work with intimate emotions or love, and is upset when Grady, and later Shayne, find out her real name and actual address and are each trying to take from her, exploiting her as a sexual woman for their own gain.
I liked that the film largely centers Kathleen Turner's character as not a victim of her sex work, and makes her more of a well-rounded person, like a middle-class professional with a fancy nice apartment who happens to do sex work on the side and isn't ashamed of it, dressing in characters (with a seemingly large costume array, including a flight attendant uniform and a nun's habit), and that while she does have some morally gray feelings later on about her line of work, she is not depicted as a fallen woman, or a victim, and finds a way to rescue herself in the end instead of Grady being her hero. Turner just commanded this film, and she was at her peak of stardom, with Body Heat behind her, Romancing the Stone the same year, and Prizzi's Honor, Peggy Sue Got Married, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? coming up in the decade.
I wasn't into John Laughlin's performance as Grady, I found him very bland. From reading the background on the film, he was chosen as a relative unknown, winning the role over Patrick Swayze and Alec Baldwin. And that Jeff Bridges even lowered his asking price, but they still couldn't afford him. I just found him boring and forgettable. A young Bruce Davison played one of his friends, and I could have imagined him more in the role of Grady as a better actor, albeit not as typically handsome as Laughlin was.
Anthony Perkins seemed to be having a lot of fun, and relishing playing this religious zealot who was clearly a fraud, even overacting in some scenes in a self-conscious way. His scenes with Kathleen Turner were some of the best in the film because they both had a lot of charisma and star power and just dove headfirst into this bizarre 80s erotic neon thriller, with a synth score by Yes' Rick Wakeman.
I liked this film a lot, though I don't think it was as weird as the Criterion description made it out to be. Sometimes I imagined it like a Brian DePalma film, but I think I was mixing it up with Body Double, which came out the same year and is also a flamboyant erotic thriller. This is fun to watch to see Kathleen Turner deliver a great performance and enjoy the neon sorta giallo vibe of it.
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