The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke

Personally, I have always wondered the sort of films that might be created by a rampantly heterosexual auteur that made cinematic works in the camp-oriented spirit of great underground cinematic queens like Andy Warhol, Werner Schroeter, and Jack Smith, so naturally I was quite astonished when I discovered the rather large and undeniably singular oeuvre of English auteur Jeff Keen (Marvo Movie, Mad Love)—the unconventional son of a butler and nurse—who ultimately sired his own insanely idiosyncratic artistic universe for both he and his family to live in. A virtual trashcan renaissance man and proud proletarian bohemian that dabbled in basically every artistic medium, including graffiti before it was a hip trend among urban negroes and wiggers, and oftentimes combined said mediums in a decidedly distinct fashion that is unmistakably his own (e.g. multi-screen ‘diary films’ and ‘Expanded Cinema’), Keen was one wonderfully crazed cat that was keen on creamy cunts, classic comics, crayons, cardboard costumes, and Catwoman, among various obsessions that permeate throughout his films. Although he did not get involved in filmmaking into he was well into his late-30s, Keen managed to create no less than 70 films and video art experiments during his inordinately prolific yet little known artistic career.  Additionally, despite being nearly middle-aged by the time he first picked up a super-8 camera, Keen's films always demonstrated an innate youthful energy and excitement, as if the auteur never lost touch with his inner child.  After all, there is probably no other man that created extra slimy graffiti oriented video art during his golden years like Keen's ‘Artwar Video’ series, including such overwhelming colorful pieces as Blatzom in Artwar and Artwar: The Last Frontier. As the oftentimes bizarre titles of his films demonstrate, Keen also created his own distinct esoteric lingo.

Arguably best known among contemporary cineastes for co-directing the dreamlike experimental short The Autumn Feast (1961) with Italian-born New York Beat poet and Warhol associate Piero Heliczer, Keen’s works were pretty much impossible to find until relatively recently with the release of the BFI DVD box-set GAZWRX: The Films of Jeff Keen (2009), which I recently had the distinct pleasure of devouring. After indulging in the greater portion of the director’s oeuvre, I came to the conclusion that The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke (1979-1984)—a darkly romantic cinematic nightmare of kaleidoscopic pornography, murder, sadomasochism, and zany Hitler fetishism—is unequivocally my favorite Keen flick.  A perversely poetic window into Keen's seemingly haunted yet nonetheless hyperactive unconscious, the unbelievably penetrating psychosexual cinematic horror show is a wonderfully rude yet strangely elegant reminder that pure and unadulterated creativity and spirit always trumps a big budget.  In short, you will not find a film that is so hopelessly kitschy yet wonderfully creative, original, poetic despite being made on a budget of next to nil shekels.

Described by Will Fowler at BFI as, “a sort of coda to his earlier stylistic phase,” the film was made during a dark period in Keen’s life after he and his wife and perennial muse Jackie Keen (aka Jacqueline Foulds) separated, The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke is a piece of intemperate idiosyncrasy and iconoclastic aesthetic raw power that might lead some viewers to suspect that the auteur is a poetic yet autistic serial killer with a nasty collection of infantile fetishes and juvenile obsessions, but of course that is what makes it such an uniquely unforgettable cinematic experience. Admittedly, my immediate interest in Keen came as a result of randomly happening upon a screenshot from the film featuring a cute brunette that I would later discover was the director’s daughter Stella Keen (aka ‘Stella Starr’), who began her own filmmaking career as a child star in her father’s films (she would later sometimes act as her father's cinematographer). Indeed, forget Fassbinder and his dysfunctional kraut superstars, you will not find a filmmaker with a more intimate relationship with his stars than Keen, who has arguably probably paid tribute to the beauty of his wife Jackie’s bare body more than any other filmmaker in cinema history. Likewise, you will not find a filmmaker who is more at both the literal and figurative center of his films than cool cracker Keen, whose art, especially his films, are magnificently masturbatory in the best sort of way.

 A king of intricate art-trash who turned his entire life into a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ where every single film, painting, drawing, poem, graffiti tag, and performance art routine that he created seems to be an important piece in one giant esoteric psychosexual autobiogasm from post-WWII Brit beatnik purgatory, Keen is, for better or worse, the best argument for the auteur theory and I would certainly say that The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke is the best introduction to his pleasantly preternatural outsider aesthetic and artistic Weltanschauung.  Indeed, love him or hate him, but it is impossible to deny that Keen was a true visionary that might be best described as the Wagner of celluloid outsider art (in fact, Keen was also heavily influenced by Nordic mythology).  Of course, quite unlike comparable artists like Joseph Cornell (Rose Hobart, Nymphlight) and Henry Darger, Keen seems to have led a relatively sane sex life, hence his focus on curvy women instead of prepubescent children, yet there is no denying that there is something intrinsically childlike about him, even if his daughter once described him as a, “typical nostalgic English man.”

 Notably, in an interview with National Arts Trust, Keen’s daughter Stella stated regarding her father’s work, “He wasn’t interested in the commercial side of things at all, apart from a fascination with the universal appeal of popular culture. He appreciated the fact that this and certain ‘lowbrow’ forms of art, e.g. comic books, rock ‘n roll etc were easily read and understood by everyone. He liked the idea of creating a universal language. He wanted all art to be more democratic – not elitist but easily accessible to all.” While Keen’s films certainly wallow in a ludicrously lowbrow aesthetic of superheroes, broken Barbie dolls, and pornography, you would probably be hard-pressed to find working-class individuals that would prefer watching his cinematic works to the latest big budget Hollywood action flick.  As for Keen's own cinematic tastes, he revealed he was far from your typical pretentious art fag when he once described the Pre-Code Béla Lugosi vehicle White Zombie (1932) as, “possibly the most beautiful film ever.”  Needless to say, Keen's films are the perfect antidote to the preposterously pedantic and mostly soulless Structural/materialist filmmakers that were prominent in the UK during the late-1960s trhough 1970s like Malcolm Le Grice, Guy Sherwin, Mike Leggett, Peter Gidal, and Annabel Nicolson, among various others, though he has somewhat strangely associated with them due to his involvement with the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC) (1966-1976).  It should also be noted that, aesthetically speaking, Keen's films are more authentically subversive and anarchic than those created by the No Wave and Cinema of Transgression filmmakers that would follow in his footsteps decades later.  Indeed, while Keen might have had a somewhat juvenile essence, none of his films are plagued by the repugnant philistine misanthropy or wholly pointless sexual degeneracy that is typical of the abortive flicks of glue-huffing causalities like Nick Zedd and Tommy Turner.

Like Keen, fellow William S. Burroughs associate and underground British avant-gardist Antony Balch (Towers Open Fire, The Cut-Ups) also experimented with creating anarchic collage oriented films that combined lowbrow and highbrow influences, but he eventually graduated on to making sleazy feature-length exploitation films like Bizarre (1970) aka Secrets of Sex and Horror Hospital (1973) that were made for more mainstream oriented consumption. In other words, Keen never even attempted to sellout and his films only became all the more arcane and inaccessible over the decades. Indeed, aside from its potent combination of melancholy and lechery, it is hard to determine what The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke is really about, though I suspect it is mainly a semi-cryptic meditation on heartbreak, hence why it features Keen’s daughter portraying an artist that creates a literal broken heart via a large paper quill. Began in 1979 but not finished until 1984, the film is also notable for featuring the director’s wife despite the fact that they were long separated when it was finally finished.  Instead of portraying a sassy tigeress or perennially smiling nudie cutie like in his earlier films, Keen's wife Jackie fittingly portrays a sensually deadly femme fatale in what was undoubtedly their last great collaboration with one another.

Beginning with an oneiric image of a classy beautiful woman that is ultimately revealed to be the front cover of MON FILM magazine, The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke then immediately bombards the viewer with a frantic combination of hypnotic imagery, including vintage stag footage superimposed over shots of a seemingly half-ruined artist’s workroom that is covered with broken baby dolls and naked Barbies hanging from ropes in what is ultimately a sort of overture for the film. While Keen’s daughter once described her father’s film influences as being, “John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, Cocteau, Bunuel, Film Noir directors like Nicholas Ray + B Movie hero Ed Wood and so many more,” the film immediately seems like a no budget Werner Schroeter flick on acid, albeit with a decidedly heterosexual focus where creepy fake boobs and pieces of cheap naked female plastic inspire unnerving erotic horrors.  A sort of cine-manic micro-triptych, the short has three distinct segments that really underscore the auteur's natural affinity for cinematic subversion in all forms, including technique, structure, imagery, editing, and morality.  At about the 1:30 minute mark of the film, the inter-titles “Blonde Destiny” and “A Reconstructed Thriller” appear juxtaposed with the less than solacing sounds of fighter aircrafts in what ultimately proves to be a relatively intricate micro-film-within-a-film that emphasizes the timeless relationship between killer and the carnal. Indeed, a short but sickly sweet sex noir-thriller set at Brighton train station, “Blonde Destiny” depicts the director’s wife-cum-muse Jackie being both brutally threatened and embraced by a killer with a gun, as well as still photos of a naughty bitch flashing her bushy beaver in public. While watching this short segment, ones does not doubt that Keen has had many elaborate fantasies regarding the ancient art of Lustmord, which is probably not all that uncommon for a artist that has separated from his lifelong muse.  Of course, Jackie's character is far from innocent, as she is depicted handling a large knife, not to mention the fact that she enjoys the tight embrace of a coldblooded killer, but I digress.  Featuring both blue and purple tinted scenes, “Blonde Destiny” contains a sort of effortlessly elegant yet raw and visceral neo-Victorian elegance that cannot really be found in any of Keen's other films.

While less than 7 minutes long in its entirety, it is not until at about the 2:18 mark of the film that the main show begins and the official inter-titles appear that read, “Hitler’s Double & The Dark Lady of the Sonnets” and “With the Spectres of E.A. Poe and Carol Borland in . . . . . . the Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke.” Indeed, not only does Uncle Adolf play a prominent role in the film, but the viewer is also exposed to the youthful melancholic pulchritude of Keen’s debutante daughter Stella, who looks like she could have inspired the cover-art for the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995), as she practically bleeds a sort of highly refined feminine somberness. Before the real action begins, the viewer is exposed to still photos of a babe in bondage and war footage that echoes the director’s lifelong obsession with the Second World War and how he narrowly missed taking part in the D-Day landings, which ultimately consumed many of his friends and colleagues in what would ultimately prove to be a seminal influence on both his life and art.

One of Keen’s rather intimate “self portrait” films like Victory Thru Film Power (1980s) and Omozap (1990-1991), The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke is, not unlike many of the director’s later films, a meta-artistic work that makes obsessive references to the director's own physical art pieces, including the “The Poet's Cot” and “The Book of the Film” (notably, Keen oftentimes created his own ‘books of the film’ that featured signed photos of the stars of the film in question). Of course, it is very telling that there is a scene in the film where the legendary Poet’s Cot goes up in flames.  Making heavy use of extra bright neon reds and blues that inspires ideas of romantic murder and sullen midnight walks in the moonlight, the film is indubitably one of Keen's most accomplished work in terms of sheer visuals.  Likewise, the film also features strangely aesthetically pleasing neon blue stock footage of der Führer. As for Hitler's double (aka Keen in a cheap Hitler mask), he seems like a creepy hopeless romantic that has fallen from grace and has been doomed to walk for eternity with wilted roses and dead children in his arms.

In what is arguably the film’s most memorable and aesthetically alluring moment, Keen’s daughter Stella creates a large broken heart with a giant paper paintbrush while blindfolded.  Moving very slowly like a romantically condemned somnambulist that is haunted by the memory of a lover that she lost long ago, Stella seems completely possessed in a completely tragic fashion, hence why she does not even need to use her eyes to paint literal heartbreak.  Of course, one also cannot forget the image of a Keen-as-Hitler carrying around naked baby dolls in his arms in what is assuredly the creepiest yet cryptic scene from the film. In one of the more bizarrely darkly romantic scenes, a red rose is superimposed over a man threatening a cringing little lady with a large knife. In another similarly unforgettable scene, ghost-like beatniks sporting pancake lounge in a room where a fat old woman reads from the “The Film of the Book” while a dorky dude with skeletal makeup plays a kitschy violin.  Undoubtedly, these ghostly characters sorrowfully echo the truly colorful players in Keen's previous films, as if the auteur is both haunted by and nostalgic about his artistic past.  After wrestling with a large translucent sheet of plastic, one of the ghost girls is attacked by the macabre musician. Towards the end of the film in what is ultimately a perversely preternatural family portrait of sorts, Keen sits next to his wife, daughter, and some naked and bloody Barbie dolls while sporting a sort of makeshift metallic robot costume. In the end, the film concludes with the poet-auteur flipping through “The Film of the Book” inter-spliced with vintage pornography of a sitting nude beauty basking in her carnal glory in a scene of poesy cinematic necrophilia (after all, the nude beauty is undoubtedly long dead). In that sense, The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke is the ultimate gothic horror flick of the underground.

I am not even going to pretend that I fully understand what The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke is really about (after all, Keen loathed attempting to intellectualize his own work), but I do know that, aesthetically speaking, it is a gift that keeps on giving that could be played on a loop for eternity and not seem the least bit banal or trite. Of course, the same could be said about many of Keen’s films, but this is one of the only films by the English auteur that emphasizes pathos over pure energetic audio-visual overload, even if it is no less overwhelming in its chaotic aesthetic fury.  Although just speculation, I am fairly convinced that the film is an expression of a man that felt like he was living in a personal pandemonium where he was haunted by the past yet even more horrified about the prospect of the future. Surely, one of the aspects of the film that makes it so potent is Keen’s daughter Stella’s central role as a sort of magical yet melancholic somnambulistic art goddess. While researching Keen and his film, I happened upon various tributes by Stella to her father where she reveals an undeniably heartwarming love, admiration, and respect for her father. In fact, I do not think it is a stretch to say that Stella is her father’s greatest fan, scholar, and protégé, among other things.

As Stella once noted, the essence of Keen’s oeuvre can be summed up in a sentence that he wrote across one of his paintings from the 1990s that read, “All life is war and the long voyage home,” which is especially true of The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke where Hitler, family members, and ancient porn stars inhabit a sort of hyper hermetic psychodramatic fever dream of the purgatorial sort that pays frenzied (anti)tribute to the perennial struggle that is life. Needless to say, the film also features one of the most bizarre and inexplicable examples of an artistic collaboration between a father and daughter. Undoubtedly, compared to the inordinate interfamilial intimacy of Keen’s film(s), underground films made in collaboration with bohemian buddies like Ken Jacob’s Little Stabs at Happiness (1960), Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), Ron Rice’s Chumlum (1953), and Ira Cohen’s The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda (1968) seems a cold, calculated, and phony as the average 1980s Hollywood action flick by comparison. In other words, The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke is like the most vulnerable yet hermetic, gritty yet meticulously stylized, and domestic yet dreamlike of home movies.

Surely, one of the most stunning aspects of The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke and many of Keen’s films is the amount of effort and obsessive attention to detail that was put into what are ultimately no budget cinematic experiments that were assembled in the rather restricted confines of the auteur’s flat. Naturally, I was not surprised to discover that, not unlike many serious artists, Keen created for largely therapeutic reasons, or as his daughter once wrote, “For Jeff, the finest human inventions were the bicycle and the hand gun. He used his brush, pen and camera like a gun. Each tool was simply a device – a means to an end. The creative act itself was the important thing, rather than the finished work. This would explain my father’s frequent habit of destroying his own work once he’d finished it; to ‘rip it up and start again’. This form of collage – the cut-up re-invented story – is fundamental to Jeff’s metier. His writing, film and painting transgresses all boundaries – but ultimately it always comes back to the drawn line. The artist’s hand is ever present, and the artist himself is always active, often viewed in action. In Jeff’s words, “It’s auto-bio-graphik, not auto-biography... direct projection, not an illustration... a comic strip of life, printed on semtex.” Indeed, Keen turned his life into a sort of unending avant-garde cinematic comic strip where the monsters and mad scientists are the good guys, nude women act as an extra solacing Greek chorus, and creativity and destruction are one and the same. Surely, you will not find a more impenetrable yet kitschy oeuvre, as Keen is like the missing link between Walt Disney and Warhol. Likewise, Keen is probably the only filmmaker that has managed to reconcile the exquisite high-camp decadence of Herr Schroeter with the shameless schlock of Troma.

Undoubtedly, few films make you feel more like a shameless voyeur than The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke where Keen violently yet jovially shouts and ejaculates his pathologies, fetishes, and dubious obsessions with the imperative help of his entire family. Indeed, watching the film seems like something akin eating shrooms and walking in on a family engaged in a bloody psychedelic orgy involving Hitler cosplay and Bellmer-esque baby doll worship. On a somewhat less degenerate yet surely more depressing note, the countless baby dolls and appearance by the auteur’s sole child in the film reminded me of Stella Keen's genuinely heartfelt eulogy to her father where she stated, “My greatest tragedy is that I wasn’t able to show any grandchildren to my dad, but there will be continuity to the Keen line somehow and, certainly, I am making sure his legacy continues to be protected and promoted long after I’m gone. Also his influence continues to filter through my own work which will hopefully go from strength to strength and inspire others as well.” Although the Archduke’s bloodline has indubitably come to an end, his cinematic works will, to some degree, live on.  Arguably cinema history's most proficient yet overlooked alchemist as a man that used literal trash and figurative artistic shit like cheap comics to create an entire elaborate cinematic universe, Keen is not only arguably the UK's greatest master of art brut, but one of its greatest avant-garde filmmaker period. After all, The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke is nothing if not the sort of film that causes the spread of cinephilia, thereupon making it the perfect flick for Keen virgins to get infected with.

-Ty E

Crimes of Passion

There is probably no other filmmaker that my opinion of has changed so drastically in the past decade or so than English auteur Ken Russell (Women in Love, The Devils), whose films I used to regard as mostly obnoxiously bombastic hagiographic celluloid swill and/or asininely aesthetically decadent quasi-pornography. Undoubtedly, out of all of Russell’s films that I had originally seen during my first attempt to tackle the auteur's oeuvre, the one I found to be the most innately worthless and just plain unwatchable was Crimes of Passion (1984) aka China Blue, which I could not even bear to finish when I attempted to watch it about a decade ago or so. As a result of my newfound affinity for Russell’s films, I naturally decided to give the film a second chance, which I am glad I did as I now regard it as one of the most underrated films of the 1980s and easily one of the director’s most innately subversive and seedy cinematic works. Indeed, forget black Brit Steve McQueen’s Shame (2011), Russell’s film makes the Michael Fassbender vehicle seem like a shallow exercise in sterile decadence in terms of its deceptively sleazy yet ultimately rather intricate and nuanced examination in regard to the perils of sexual addiction (or what might be better described as ‘sexual nihilism’) and issues relating to fears of intimacy and monogamy. While the film might feature hilariously perverse things like Anthony ‘Psycho’ Perkins menacingly wielding a deadly silver dildo named ‘Superman,’ the bloody slaughter of a blowup doll (!) by Perkins, and a corrupt cop being sodomized with his own baton while stiletto heels are simultaneously penetrating his flesh, among numerous other equally darkly erotically eccentric examples of cinematic alchemy where trashy scenarios and imagery are executed in an inordinately elegantly stylized fashion, Crimes of Passion is indubitably, for better or worse, one of the most sophisticated films ever made about the stark contrast between soulless sex and genuine sexual intimacy and how many people that regularly engage in the former lack the emotional capacity for the latter.  Indeed, in Russell's wayward celluloid realm of transcendental sleaze, a smart and beauteous fashion designer is more afraid of love and committment than violently shoving long inanimate objects up men's asses while wildly riding their cocks.  Crimes of Passion is also probably the only film ever made where a ghetto reverend manages to find the ultimate form of redemption by being murdered with a dildo while dressed in extra kitschy drag.

 Adapted from a screenplay by a fairly unknown homo Hebrew named Barry Sandler, who is arguably best known otherwise for penning the gay love triangle piece Making Love (1982) directed by fellow Israelite Arthur Hiller, Russell’s film also features a bizarre love triangle, albeit of a considerably seedier and more sexually depraved sort that does not involve sodomy. Not unlike Sander with his screenplay for Making Love being bastardized for mainstream consumption, Russell had bad experiences with Hollywood studios butchering or otherwise manipulating his two previous American efforts Valentino (1977) and Altered States (1980), so the two made for perfect partners for a cinematic collaboration, or as the auteur better explained himself in Altered States: The Autobiography of Ken Russell (1991), “Recently some of the most popular evangelists on TV were exposed for the scum they are, but at the time I was asked to direct my first truly original American screenplay their mask of sanctity was yet to be torn away. Yes, my agent had at last landed me a job—a real job, not a development deal but a definite offer to make CRIMES OF PASSION. It was a package deal. The writer, Barry Sandler, was handled by the same agency. Barry was something of a maverick, though not as far out of the Hollywood mainstream as myself. He was, however, equally disillusioned. Having written an adult screenplay for Fox about a married couple who turn into a ménage a trios when the husband comes out of the closet with his boyfriend, Barry had the painful experience of seeing his creation castrated for being too ballsy. He hoped for better things from New World, who didn’t have such a high moral profile to uphold. So did I.  They were known for their cheap exploitation movies and, because no one else seemed to want us, they got us cheap too—with Kathleen Turner into the bargain [...] The screenplay dealt with identities, split personalities and the masks those in the rat race for the American Dream feel compelled to wear if they're out to win.  Sometimes the mask becomes more real than the face underneath, especially if it's a public face.  And then we're in trouble.” 

 Arguably what might be best described as the most cultivated, nuanced, and sophisticated exploitation film ever made, Russell’s devilishly dark and satirical anti-romcom neo-noir is indubitably a cinematic work of Elephantiasis level testicular fortitude where two very different people—a young and naive yet kindhearted family man and a socially alienated workaholic fashion designer that moonlights as a pimp-free ghetto hooker—that hide behind masks learn to be themselves and embrace reality after unexpectedly falling in love with one another. Also featuring a morally depraved ghetto reverend portrayed by Anthony Perkins who completes the bizarre love triangle that attempts to ‘save’ the hooker from her lonely life of self-destructive lechery due to his belief that they are same due to their pathological longing for self-destructive sexual debasement, Crimes of Passion is like Andy Milligan’s Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973) meets Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966) meets Werner Schroeter’s Malina (1991) with shades of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). In short, there is nothing quite like Russell’s darkly romantic romp of Reagan era raunchiness, yet, despite its glaring degeneracy, the film ultimately contains a surprisingly positive and important message about emotional alienation in the age of porn, big hair, and rampant materialism. 

 In a morally inverted and exceedingly emasculated (post)feminist world where many young woman waste their most fertile years working as virtual corporate prostitutes doing abstract paper-shuffling in offices and ultimately end up unhappy unmarried old maids and where young white men have become disillusioned with starting a family and even sometimes give up on women altogether as reflected in dubious online communities like MGTOW, Crimes of Passion is arguably more important now then when it was first released in terms of diagnosing what is wrong with modern couples and society in general. Of course, as a fetish-fueled man that was married no less than four times during his rather eventful life, director Russell certainly had some special insights in regard to the problem between the sexes and the importance of sex in a healthy relationship. As the film demonstrates, genuine organic intimacy is an imperative ingredient in terms of maintaining a healthy relationship, especially as far as the male partner is concerned (as the film hints, women are better suited to live sexually unsatisfying lives, especially if it is to their material benefit). Likewise, as the hooker portrayed by Kathleen Turner demonstrates, sexually promiscuity is innately soulless and typical of a damaged and most likely morally bankrupt individual that is either afraid of and/or lacks the capacity for true sexual intimacy, hence the tendency of so-called ‘sex workers’ (e.g. prostitutes, strippers, porn stars, etc.) to be the unfortunate products of child molestation and/or a single mother.

While the male protagonist of the film portrayed by John Laughlin lies to himself about the fact that his marriage is a sham and that his fiercely frigid wife is sexually repulsed by him, the female protagonist has created an entire phony prostitute persona that allows herself to feel strong and in control when, in reality, she is a terribly lonely emotional cripple that is afraid of devotion, intimacy, and love, hence her need to live a double life as the city's most brazenly sensually eccentric pussy-peddler. Luckily, in Russell’s film, opposites attract and the young married businessman and bourgeois prostitute are able to shed their masks and embrace reality after falling in love with one another.  Of course, the film would not be complete without Mr. Perkins' performance as psychotic pervert reverend that partly acts as the chic hooker's unlikely savior.  A piece of meticulously stylized high-camp trash-with-class with the sort of strange hermetic melodrama that you would expect from a classic 1960s George Kuchar flick like Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966) or Eclipse Of The Sun Virgin (1967), including lavishly stylized silhouette sex scenes, Crimes of Passion is a rare cinematic work that manages to communicate an important message without succumbing to cheap sentimentality or heavy-handed art fag pretentiousness. In fact, as a result of using exaggerated fetishistic imagery and kinky quasi-pornographic scenarios, Russell ultimately tricks the viewer into devouring what is, thematically speaking, a relatively wholesome film that says more about love than any Woody Allen or Wes Anderson film could.

 The film begins awkwardly yet hilariously enough with all-American male protagonist Bobby Grady (John Laughlin)—an unhappily marriage middleclass electronics store owner with two kids—sitting in on a sex group therapy session while he listens to men and women expression their hatred for the opposite sex (for instance, one fine chap makes a joke about vaginas smelling like fish). While Bobby claims that he is only there to support his homey Donny Hopper (Bruce Davison), he loses his cool when an unseen misandristic bitch singles him out for verbal venom and absurdly accuses him of being a “lousy lay” despite knowing literally nothing about him. As a poor horny fellow that just wants a little bit of sex yet is married to a fiercely frigid bitch that will not even give him a meager peck on the lips, Bobby takes offense to the woman’s completely fabricated accusation and retorts in an impassioned fashion that reveals he has serious marriage problems, “I’m not the one who complains how tired I am every night. Getting her to make love . . . It’s like asking her to run the Boston Marathon. And then those times when we actually do go through with it, I don’t know whether to embrace her or embalm her. So don’t tell me that I’m a lousy lay.”  Needless to say, Bobby then proceeds to walkout of the group therapy session, but that does not stop him from obsessing over the fact that his wife refuses to fuck him.

Despite the fact that he is a handsome man with an athletic build and a great provider for his family, Bobby’s preternaturally prudish wife Amy (Annie Potts)—an oftentimes cunty stay-at-home-mom that seems more offended by the mere idea of sex than the average Catholic priest—refuses to have sexual contact of any kind with her fairly loving hubby. Needless to say, when Bobby comes into contact with a sophisticated fashion designer named Joanna Crane (Kathleen Turner) that moonlights as fetish oriented streetwalker with the pseudonym ‘China Blue,’ he cannot help but cheat on his wife and reconsider his marriage altogether. When the viewer first sees China Blue, she is doing a sort of bad performance art routine where she pretends to give an acceptance speech for “Miss Liberty 1984” while some random sleaze-bag chows down on her meat-curtain. As an emotionally damaged divorcee and workaholic that is absolutely afraid of intimacy and commitment, Joanna uses her ‘China Blue’ routine to give herself a false sense of control and sexual power, but it is obvious that she is morbidly lonely and secretly longs for something more than just cheap carnal thrills. Needless to say, Bobby eventually shatters Joanna’s delusions of sexual grandeur when he pays for her services and she cums with extra creamy glee. After all, as a certain character stated in David Mamet’s Homicide in regard to the wise worlds of an old whore, “When you start cumin’ with the customers, it’s time to quit.”  While virtually all of her customers act like white knights after fucking her by acting as if they want to save her, only Bobby is actually serious about it, though the female protagonist does have unexpected help from an uniquely unholy holy man.

 Before she ever meets Bobby boy, Joanna is harassed by a quasi-psychotic street preacher named Reverend Peter Shayne (Anthony Perkins in arguably the most overlooked role of his career), who regularly inhales poppers (aka alkyl nitrites) in peepshows while guys masturbate beside him in a sort of pay-to-play communal circle-jerk and who regularly carries around a black leather doctor bag containing an eclectic collection aberrosexual sex toys (notably, Perkins designed and/or obtained these toys himself). Upon first encountering Joanna while she is roaming the streets as ‘China Blue,’ the Reverend immediately decides that he and she are the “same” person and that he will be her “holy messenger” and save her from a miserable and lonely life of sin and self-destructive sexual degradation. Indeed, as the Reverend eventually tells Joanna, “All you need to know about me is that I intend to save you. And all you need to do is . . . be there. Stay with me, China Blue. Trust me. I’ll free you.” While he is indubitably a lecherous lunatic of the psychosexually murderous sort that seems like he would rape a rotting corpse if he inhaled enough poppers, the good Reverend genuinely wants to save Joanna from herself and he is willing to sacrifice himself to achieve that goal, even if he does not waste an opportunity to verbally degrade and berate her in the process.  As a hyper hypercritical religious man that seems to see his own life as a lost cause, the Reverend believes that saving Joanna will be his final act of redemption lest he be regulated to hell like all the other sinners in the 1980s neo-Sodom where he dwells.

 Aside from owning a modest electronics store where he is beloved by his handful employees, Bobby also moonlights doing semi-sleazy surveillance work and it is as a result of being hired to spy on Joanna that he learns about her and her secret double-life as a flamboyantly dressed gutter grade whore. Indeed, Bobby is hired by Joanna’s stingy Jewish boss Lou Bateman (Norman Burton) to spy on her for somewhat dubious reasons.  In fact, Bateman has no problem telling Bobby, “I want you to nail her lily white ass” because he believes Joanna is secretly selling unreleased patterns and designs from his clothing company to rival brands, even though he has no real evidence to support his claim aside from his general disinterest of her due to her strong work ethic, seeming disgust of penis, and seemingly nonexistent personal life. Of course, Bobby literally nails Joanna’s ass, but not in the way that Mr. Bateman hoped. When Bobby first sees Joanna while she is working at her day job, he states to Mr. Bateman, “How could someone that looks like that be a criminal?,” but he ultimately learns later that night that she is the kinkiest little hard-working white whore in town. At first, Bobby merely spies on Joanna and films some of her nocturnal excursions, but after having a vicious fight with his wife Alice he eventually gets the gall to follow both his heart and hard-on and procure her sensual services.

When Bobby first goes to see Joanna, he reveals his inordinate sensitivity by warning her “Go slow. I’m just a Boy Scout” and then attempts to ask her who she really is, but she merely replies “It’s not a prom date, sweetie. I’m a hooker, you’re a trick. Why ruin a perfect relationship?” and hands him a Quaalude so that he can “fly” while fucking. To her most pleasant yet perplexing surprise, Joanna really gets into being sensitively banged by Bobby in a variety of positions and cannot believe that she is sharing a seemingly immaculate sex session that involves real visceral feelings and deep intimacy.  As demonstrated by the fact that she passionately sucks his toes and massages his entire body with the utmost sensitivity during foreplay, Joanna seems to have a special affection for Bobby before he even demonstrates that he has a talent for pleasuring her puss with his pulsating prick.  In what is undoubtedly one of the most unforgettable and aesthetically pleasing sex scene in sinema history, Russell highlights the orgasmic majesty of Bobby and Joanna's first sexual encounter via kaleidoscopic silhouettes.

 As a woman that has a serious problem with intimacy, Joanna almost immediately starts a fight with Bobby after they have otherworldly sex as a sort of defense mechanism, so he passionately states to her, “Why are we acting like this? I thought fucking was supposed to bring people closer together, not drive them apart.” When Bobby emotionally states, “What we did today . . . You felt it too, didn’t you? You weren’t just acting. You felt what I did. Tell me, please. I have to know,” Joanna cannot deny it, so she changes the subject by asking him if he wants to see her again, but he somberly replies, “Yes . . . but I can’t” and then leaves. Needless to say, when the Reverend shows up right after Bobby leaves and immediately begins berating her, Joanna is more than a little bit pissed and wastes no time in berating the bat-shit crazy holy man, though she is not as tough as usual and is more vulnerable to his venomous attacks.  Indeed, as a result of being made to feel vulnerable by Bobby, Joanna almost completely breaks down when the Reverend declares that he has written her a poem and then recites with a sort of sadistically smug hateful glee that you would expect from a half-psychotic white bourgeois social justice warrior, “Behold this wicked woman. She falls, she mends, she crawls, she bends. She sucks it, fucks it, picks it up and licks it. You can whip her, beat her, maul her, mistreat her. Anything you want as long as you don’t touch her. Shoe her affection, she turns to stone.” Additionally, Joanna can hardly argue with the Reverend when he screams in her face, “Do you know what you are? DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE? A cheap painted slut who makes a fortune selling illusions yet still ends up broke.” As a highly secretive and all but completely emotionally impenetrable S&M oriented hooker with a phony persona that is in stark contrast to her real personality, Joanna naturally never expected that her less than legal profession would lead to her being consumed in the most absurd of bizarre love triangles, but luckily for her both men will ultimately inspire her to reassess her life and inevitably embrace true love over soulless fleeting lust. 

 In between his regular ghetto soapbox sermons where he proselytizes with venom with hilariously bastardized pieces of scripture like, “Their blood have they shed like water round Jerusalem. Like, like, like . . . They fuck and they piss and they shit like the fucking scum they are,” the renegade Reverend regularly spies on Johanna via a fancy makeshift peephole. Indeed, the Reverend is so obsessed with Joanna that he rents out a motel room right next to her China White blue pad that he fills with bizarre pornographic collages that seem like the were inspired by the artistic works of English outsider artist and filmmaker Jeff Keen (Mad Love, The Dreams and Past Crimes of the Archduke). A psychosexually schizophrenic sermonizing sicko that is hopelessly torn between his degenerate sexual fetish(es) and religious faith, the Reverend becomes increasingly mentally unstable after meeting Joanna and it soon becomes obvious that he will soon explode in full-blown insanity and commit a most horrific act of the strangely spiritually transcendental sort.

 Meanwhile, Bobby becomes increasingly annoyed with his snooty sexless wife Amy, especially after she gets a considerably bitchy attitude at a cookout party where the male protagonist does a totally tasteless yet nonetheless humorous “human penis” routine where he acts like an ejaculating cock by spitting tons of milk out of his mouth.  In fact, that night, Bobby gets so angry at Amy's insufferable passive-aggressive bullshit that he yells at her until she finally opens up and meekly confesses that she never enjoyed sex with him and would even fake orgasms to make him happy. At this point, Bobby becomes even angrier and yells in an impassioned fashion to his wife, “What do you think I am. Some kind of machine? That I just need a hole to cum in? I mean, what do you think makes me cum? […] I’ll tell you. I thought it was being inside the woman that I love. And giving her as much pleasure as she was giving to me. You know, the two of us, together.” Of course, Joanna makes Bobby cum in exactly that perfect way that he describes to his wife, so naturally he cannot help but proceed to pursue her in real-life as an actual and person instead of mere cheap whore and fantasy, especially after finally accepting the fact that his marriage with Amy is a lost cause. 

 Needless to say, when Bobby randomly shows up to her apartment and reveals that he knows her true identity, Joanna is more than a tad bit taken aback and acts if she is going to suffer a major panic attack. Luckily, Bobby has a way with words and somewhat lightens her up by stating, “You remind me of this hamster I had when I was a kid. He ran away whenever you tried to touch him. So I wanted to show him there’s nothing to be afraid of. So one day, I just picked him up real fast and I held him […] he shit in my hand.” When Bobby soon leaves in just as an awkward manner as he first arrived, it obvious by the express on Joanna’s face that she is glad he came and wishes that he stayed longer.  Not surprisingly, when Joanna later engages in sex with a young cop and penetrates him in the ass with his nightstick and his skin with her stilettos, she seems to realizes the soullessness of such a fleeting fetishistic encounter, especially after the perverted policeman hatefully spits in her face when she tells him a goofy joke regarding ivory soap being “99 and 44/100% pure” that Bobby once told to her. Likewise, when she attempts to engage in a threesome in a limousine with an uptight middle-aged yuppie couple that complains about their daughter’s Jewish boyfriend not being able to go to their country club, she becomes so agitated that she swiftly aborts the mobile ménage a trio before it even gets past the foreplay stage. Ultimately, it is not until an old woman picks her up off the streets to have sex with her terminally ill husband Ben (Gerald S. O'Loughlin) that Joanna truly realizes the morally bankruptcy and soullessness of her carnal trade and decides to give up her sensually counterfeit China Blue persona for good.  Indeed, when Ben demonstrates his love for his wife by stating things like, “I didn’t want her to do this. I haven’t been with another woman in 28 years. But she insisted” and ultimately refusing to have sex with her because he cannot bear to be unfaithful to his beloved, Joanna is so deeply moved by the dying old fart's untainted love and devotion toward his spouse that she takes off her silly platinum blonde wig and tells the old man that her real name is “Joanna,” thereupon symbolically shedding her prostitute persona. 

 After deciding to leave his wife, Bobby heads over to Joanna’s apartment and tells her, “The first time Amy and I made love, she asked me if I still respected her. Hell, I thought that’s the reason we did it. Well, it’s all over,” but she is clearly still scared of intimacy and commitment and replies, “It’s so hard, Bobby. No man’s ever given me that kind of faith before, that kind of respect. But that hotel is the safest place in the world. I can do anything there, I can be anything I can dream of because it’s not me. Don’t you see? I’d only end up disappointing you.” After Bobby swears to Joanna that he is totally “tough” and can handle anything, especially after being in a sexless marriage for over a decade, the two more or less decide to become an official monogamous couple. Unfortunately, Bobby’s wife Amy, who is the virtual stereotype of a pathetically helpless woman, is not used to not having a man around to do everything for her and thus makes a desperate and highly insincere attempt to get her hubby back. When Amy finally comes to the bitter realization that Bobby is seeing another woman, she naturally becomes extremely jealous and bitchily asks him if his lover has “the morals of a bitch in heat,” but he makes her seem like an infantile puritanical idiot by smoothly retorting, “It may come as a shock to you but sex is one hell of a way to show what you feel.” While Amy tries in vain to demonstrate that she still loves him by making him dinner and giving him a nostalgic symbolic present in the quite literally priceless form of his old high school varsity football jersey (apparently, said jersey used to turn-on Amy when they were high school sweethearts), she cannot deny her sexual apathy for Bobby and eventually literally runs away like a scared little girl. Of course, that is the last straw for Bobby, who decides to completely dedicate himself to Joanna. Unfortunately, the Reverend has big plans for Joanna that involve killer cross-dressing and quite deadly phallocentric weapons. 

 Before Bobby can go and officially declare his complete and utter devotion to Joanna, the Reverend arrives at her apartment to perform “last rites” and to “save her for once and for all.” Of course, considering the fact that he soon hands her a deadly silver dildo named ‘Superman’ and demands, “Kill me Joanna. Give my life value. Give me something to die for! Same me! You are me. One of us has to die so that the other can live,” the Reverend seems to be merely projecting his own desires when it comes to exorcising (or possibly exercising) his demons. Hoping to experience death-by-dildo, the Reverend then gets on his knees and attempts to egg Joanna into killing him by shouting, “Kill my you worthless cunt. I’m all the men who have ever hurt you, who made you feel like shit. Who stole your self-respect and turned you into China Blue. Kill me! Release the rage. Get it out. Get even.” While Joanna seems like she might kill the Reverend, she takes too long, so the Reverend eventually gets up and coldly demands, “Strip, bitch.” When Bobby finally gets back to the apartment, he is disconcerted to discover that the door his locked and Joanna is screaming like a banshee, so he breaks said door down and discovers what looks like a brutal murder scene sans blood. When Bobby sees who he assumes is Joanna cowering on the ground in her iconic China Blue outfit, he gets quite the surprise when his little lady leaps out of nowhere from behind him in holy drag and plunges the dildo into the Reverend’s back during a moment of bittersweet transsexual sacrifice.  In a successful attempt to bait Joanna into killing him, the Reverend acted as if he was going to stab Bobby with a pair of scissors.  Before succumbing to his wounds, the Reverend reveals that his holy work is done and that he is quite satisfied with the results by lovingly stating to the female protagonist, “Goodbye, China Blue.”

In the end in a sassy conclusion that, at the very least, rivals the final words of Kubrick's swansong Eyes Wide Shut, the film comes full circle with a moving monologue from Bobby at the sex group therapy session where he states, “I’m here tonight . . . because I wanted to finally start telling the truth. My wife and I, we’ve split up for good. That’s right. Me, the boy scout. I just never had the guts to admit the truth, that Amy and I had just stopped loving each other. There’s nobody to blame. That’s just what happened. Then . . . I met this woman, Joanna. She saved my life. We’re together now. I’m not sure if it’s gonna work out. We don’t have a whole hell of a lot in common other than the fact that . . . we both need help and each other. The thing, you see, that scared me the most during my marriage was just admitting that I was scared, and letting Amy down. Well, I can’t pretend anymore. I was scares shitless to come back here. I told Joanna. And she took me in her arms and she said, ‘It’s OK to be scared.’ I felt . . . stronger. And freer. And more like a man than I’ve ever felt before in my life. Then we fucked our brains out.” 

 Despite being a cinematic work that, aesthetically speaking, shamelessly epitomizes the 1980s, it is still hard to fathom that Crimes of Passion was released during the Reagan years when Tinseltown had regressed to such a pathetic level that they were virtually mimicking the worst of the Hollywood Golden Age in terms of morality and lack of innovation of any sort. Indeed, Russell’s film is indubitably the antidote to phony 1980s bourgeois melodramas like Robert Redford’s patently pathetic philosemitic joke Ordinary People (1980), as well as extra lame proto-neocon propaganda like Tony Scott’s Top Gun (1986) and John Milius’ Red Dawn (1984). In terms of sheer debauchery and both sexual and aesthetic idiosyncrasy, there really aren’t that many 1980s films that Russell's flick can really be compared to aside from the random celluloid oddity like Nicholas Roeg’s Bad Timing (1980), Insignificance (1985), and Track 29 (1988) and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). Of course, next to Russell’s film, Roeg’s somewhat uneven chamber piece Insignificance seems like a piece of pedantry as created by someone that is more interested in talking about sex than actually engaging in it (of course, the idea of Marilyn Monroe flirting with Albert Einstein is just plain repugnant and surely a hopelessly cucked white liberal's degree, but I digress).

 Notably, when a gay friend-cum-fan once accused Russell of being a “latent homosexual,” the auteur humorously replied, “Fine, maybe I am, who knows. I don’t think anyone knows themselves. We can all pretend, but I have an idea what I am. I’m me!,” so it is interesting that Crimes of Passion manages to be one of the oh-so rare cinematic works that can unequivocally be described as rampantly heterosexual high-camp in the best sort of way. Of course, one cannot deny the film’s crypto-queer influence in the form of screenwriter Barry Sandler and star Anthony Perkins, who both acted as sort of secondary auteurs to the film. Indeed, aside from portraying an unforgettable unhinged character that is like a rock-bottom version of his titular character from Psycho, Perkins designed his own insanely idiosyncratic set pieces, got high in real-life inhaling poppers like the stereotypical degenerate promiscuous faggot, and even became a ‘real’ Reverend after sending $10 and an application to the so-called Universal Life Church (in fact, when Russell got married to his second wife Vivian Jolly, Perkins was responsible for blessing the union). Needless to say, it is a sad irony that Perkins ultimately died of an illness that was caused by the same reckless sexual debauchery that plagued both his character and the film’s female protagonist, but then again knowing this fact only makes for an all the more potently perverse cinematic experience.  Undoubtedly, there is no doubt to the viewer while watching the flick that Perkins is having so much fun playing, as if it is his dream role.

As revealed in the fairly mundane Sandler penned movie Making Love (1982), monogamy is not really a gay virtue, thus making it all the more seemingly inexplicable that Crimes of Passion—a rather pro-monogamy/pro-intimacy film that makes a clear distinction between true sexual intimacy and soulless fucking—was written by a gay man (somewhat strangely, Sander’s most recent effort was writing the negro horror-comedy Knock 'em Dead (2014) directed by David DeCoteau). 

 Thankfully, Sandler revealed his inspiration for the screenplay in an interview with Queerty, stating, “I started writing it at the tail end of the ‘70s and we were living in an age of rampant sex, particularly in the gay community. This was before AIDS so everybody was fucking around and having sex everywhere you looked. You’d stop at a red light to cruise the guy next to you and you’d end up back at his place. Yet I was thinking there was a story there about how people use sex to avoid intimacy and replace having to work at a relationship. It was so out there and so accessible. I thought that if I could take that theme and concept and weave it into a story — not a gay story, because I’d just done MAKING LOVE. I wanted to do something that would speak to gay people but would speak beyond that as well. I used whatever utensils I had as a writer to come up with the story, as twisted as it may be. It wasn’t based on any one person. It sort of evolved in a strange way. It was initially a two-character piece with China Blue and the reverend, who was originally a shrink. It’s probably the script of mine that took the longest to evolve. A lot of that had to do with studios who were afraid to touch it. Beyond that I just kept going back to it and add certain layers.” 

 Rather sadly but not surprisingly, Crimes of Passion is, in many ways, more relevant today than when it was first released over three decades ago. Indeed, in an era where many young women have taken countless cocks and thus will probably never have a successful marriage (despite what the feminists say, there is indeed a direct correlation between how many sexual partners a woman has had and her chances of having a successful marriage) and young men are no longer interested in marriage due to the lack of real incentives (after all, you no longer need to marry a girl to fuck her nowadays) and fears regarding divorce court, Russell’s film seems like a rare unlikely voice of sanity in a slimy sea of celluloid swill, but of course its message will probably be lost on most viewers who are probably more interested in obsessing over Über-bitch diva Kathleen Turner sporting a super trashy platinum blonde wig while riding a cop's cock and Anthony Perkins wielding a bloody dildo of death. Of course, the genius of the film is that it manages to use shock humor and sexual debauchery to disseminate a relatively wholesome message about the virtues of monogamy and the perils developing of a phony persona in a manner that can be understood and appreciated by even the most sexually intemperate of degenerates and perverts. After all, it is not often that one encounters a morally sound satirical neo-noir featuring artwork by Art Nouveau illustrator Aubrey Beardsley and Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir John Everett Millais (I  must confessed that “Ophelia” is a personal favorite of mine), a narcotizing synthesizer-heavy score by Rick Wakeman that is based entirely on Antonín Dvorák’s New World Symphony (1893), and Anthony Perkins more or less parodying his legendary killer tranny character Norman Bates.

In his relatively popular film reference book The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2004), David Thomson complains, “The overall need to sensationalize artists and to reduce them to comic-book Freud and TV commercial glamour is justified by Russell as a means to making them more popular.”  Of course, Thomson makes a valid criticism, which is especially apparent upon watching Altered States and Crimes of Passion since neither of these films, quite unlike much of Russell's earlier films, are plagued by these flaws.  Indeed, I would even go so far as to argue that, aside from possibly his magnum opus The Devils (1971), Crimes of Passion is Russell's most immaculately assembled film. I certainly cannot think of another film where the whole ‘hooker with a heart of gold’ motif is actually used in genuinely intriguing fashion and is not used as a pathetic attempt at cheap humanist sentimentalism or Marxist agitprop. As a successful and sophisticated fashion designer that treasures art and is more geared toward love and sexual compatibility than succumbing to the cold female instinct of hypergamy, Kathleen Turner's characters is, quite ironically, the virtual ideal woman, which would explain her sense of isolation; while the male protagonist's sexless wife is the total opposite as a seemingly soulless woman that married solely for material reasons in a film that, somewhat inadvertently, clearly demonstrates why many modern men avoid marriage lest they become cuckolds of divorce court.  As to how a beauteous and cultivated woman could turn into a prostitute, Georges Bataille offered a good idea when he wrote, “Not every woman is a potential prostitute, but prostitution is the logical consequence of the feminine attitude.  In so far as she is attractive, a woman is a prey to men's desire.  Unless she refuses completely because she is determined to remain chaste, the question is at what price and under what circumstances will she yield.  But if the conditions are fulfilled she always offers herself as an object.  Prostitution proper only brings in a commercial element.  By the care she lavishes on her toilet, by the concern she has for her beauty set off by her adornment, a woman regards herself as an object always trying to attract men's attention.  Similarly if she strips naked she reveals the object of a man's desire, an individual and particular object to be prized.”

-Ty E