Crimes of Passion: Ken Russell's Deranged Erotic Satire

Ken Russell was the great vulgarian of British cinema, a director who treated good taste as an enemy to be routed, and Crimes of Passion is one of his most gleefully deranged films. Released in 1984 through the low-budget outfit New World, written by Barry Sandler, it is an erotic thriller that keeps veering into satire, melodrama and outright hysteria, often within the same scene. Where Verhoeven would later film the genre with cold control and De Palma with self-aware technique, Russell attacks it with a flamethrower, and the result is a garish, uneven, genuinely strange picture that has aged into a cult object precisely because nobody else would have dared make it.

The film belongs to Kathleen Turner, and it captures her at her most fearless. Fresh from the noir heat of Body Heat and the adventure-comedy stardom of Romancing the Stone, she took a role that most rising stars would have run from: Joanna Crane, a buttoned-down Los Angeles fashion designer who leads a double life as a street prostitute called China Blue. The performance is a high-wire act of two contradictory characters inhabiting one body, and Turner plays both without a safety net. Opposite her, Anthony Perkins gives one of the most unhinged performances of his career as a sweaty, deranged street preacher stalking China Blue with a bag of horrors and a head full of scripture. The two of them push the film to a pitch that is by turns disturbing, absurd and weirdly moving.

The film, kept above the line

The plot, above the spoiler line, braids three strands. Joanna Crane is a designer suspected by her employer of leaking secrets, and a private investigator, Bobby Grady, played by John Laughlin, is hired to follow her. Grady is a decent, dull family man in a sexually dead marriage, and his surveillance of Joanna’s after-hours life as China Blue draws him into her orbit and cracks his own domestic complacency wide open. Meanwhile the Reverend Peter Shayne, Perkins’s preacher, prowls the same nocturnal streets, obsessed with China Blue and convinced he has been called to save or destroy her.

Russell uses this pulpy triangle as a delivery system for a full-scale assault on American sexual hypocrisy: the loveless marriage, the sanctimonious moralist who is himself the sickest figure in the film, the double life a woman must lead to be both respectable and desired. Above the line the picture is a lurid, satirical melodrama about people trapped between what they want and what they are permitted to admit wanting. Everything to this point is safe to read before watching; the film builds to a confrontation I will keep below the line.

Why it works: tone as a weapon

Crimes of Passion is not a controlled film, and its lack of control is the point. Russell swings the tone violently — a scene of genuine erotic melancholy will collide with broad farce, a moment of real tenderness will be undercut by grotesque comedy — and the whiplash is deliberate, a formal expression of a culture that cannot hold its feelings about sex steady for more than a minute. The film is lit like a nightmare cabaret, drenched in electric blues and hot pinks, its Los Angeles a neon underworld that feels one degree removed from a stage musical. Russell came out of a background in flamboyant, operatic filmmaking, and he treats a cheap erotic thriller with the same maximalist excess he brought to his composer biopics and The Devils.

The craft worth pointing to is Russell’s refusal to let the audience settle into a single mode of watching. Just as you decide the film is a serious study of a woman’s divided self, it lurches into camp; just as you dismiss it as camp, Turner delivers a monologue of such raw feeling that the floor drops out. This instability is exhausting by design and it is also the source of the film’s strange power, because it never lets you feel superior to the material. Rick Wakeman’s score, adapting themes from Dvořák, lends the whole delirium an incongruous grandeur, scoring a film about back-street sex with the sweep of the concert hall.

Turner is the reason it holds together. China Blue is a performance within the performance — a character Joanna puts on — and Turner plays the seams, letting you see the exhausted woman underneath the brassy persona. It is a genuinely brave piece of acting from a star at the height of her mainstream appeal, and it is the tragic core that keeps the film from dissolving into pure provocation. When she drops the China Blue voice and speaks as Joanna, the film briefly becomes a serious portrait of loneliness, and those moments are why the cult around it endures.

The censorship history

Crimes of Passion is inseparable from its battles with the ratings board. Russell’s original cut was slapped with an X rating in the United States, commercial poison, and he was forced to trim the film to secure an R for theatrical release. The fuller version has circulated since on home video as an unrated director’s cut, and the discrepancy between the two is part of the film’s cult identity, a reminder of how narrow the corridor was for adult-themed American cinema in the mid-1980s. The picture sits at a hinge point, made just before the erotic thriller went fully mainstream and profitable, and its troubles with the censors mark the boundary that a film like Basic Instinct would later negotiate with a studio’s lawyers rather than a maverick’s defiance.

On the ad-safe question, the film’s provocations are theatrical and satirical rather than explicit for its own sake. Russell is interested in the ideas around sex — repression, performance, hypocrisy, the violence that hides inside piety — and he stages them as heightened, stylised spectacle. Perkins’s preacher is the film’s real obscenity, and Russell knows it: the moralist with murder in his heart is a far darker figure than anything China Blue does for a living.

Where it sits in the collection

Crimes of Passion is the deranged uncle of the 1980s erotic thriller, and it makes most sense placed beside its more disciplined relatives. The obvious companion is its exact contemporary, Brian De Palma’s Body Double, released the same year — where De Palma pursues the Hitchcockian gaze with cool precision, Russell pursues the same neon Los Angeles with a wrecking ball, and the two films together map the range the genre could reach. The other essential neighbour is Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, the form’s later commercial apotheosis, which took the transgressions Russell had to fight the censors over and turned them into the biggest hit of its year.

Reaching further back, Russell’s interest in sex as a battleground between desire and control connects to the art-cinema seriousness of Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, which pursues the same subject with none of Russell’s saving humour and all of his intensity. Both films treat carnality as a total, consuming force, and both use it to say something about the society pressing down on their characters.

The verdict: Crimes of Passion is a mess, and it is a fascinating, fearless, unrepeatable mess, held together by a Kathleen Turner performance of real courage and animated by a director who never once thought about restraint. It is uneven in the way that only genuinely ambitious trash can be, and it rewards the viewer willing to ride its tonal chaos rather than fight it. Watch it for Turner, for Perkins at his most alarming, and for the sight of a great vulgarian aiming his excess at a target that deserves it.

Spoilers below

The film’s dark engine is Perkins’s Reverend Shayne, and Russell escalates his derangement steadily until the preacher’s fixation on China Blue curdles into a plan to purge her. Shayne is the film’s argument made flesh: the man who publicly condemns sex is the one carrying instruments of harm, and Russell stages his final assault on China Blue as the logical endpoint of repression turned murderous. The climactic confrontation brings the three strands together — Grady, drawn fully into Joanna’s world and finally in love with the woman rather than the persona, arrives in time to intervene against Shayne’s attack, and the collision resolves the melodrama in a burst of violence and rescue.

What lingers past the pulp mechanics is the ending’s insistence on redemption. Russell, for all his provocation, lets Joanna step out of the China Blue disguise for good and choose the possibility of an honest connection with Grady, closing a film about sexual despair on an unexpectedly hopeful note. It is a jarring landing after so much delirium, and that jarring quality is characteristic of the whole film — Russell will not be predicted, and having spent two hours skewering the American bedroom, he grants his heroine the one thing his satire seemed designed to deny her. The tonal chaos runs all the way to the final scene, and the sincerity of that closing turn is the last surprise in a film built entirely from them.