Directed by
Dan Klores / Fisher Stevens
92 minutes
Rated M
Reviewed by
Sharon Hurst
Crazy Love
Synopsis: Fact is definitely stranger than fiction in this true story of Linda Riss and Bert Pugach who met back in 1957. He was swept away by her beauty and she by his wealth and power. He promised he’d divorce his wife to marry Linda, but when that didn’t happen and she became engaged to another man, Bert went into a major bout of “if I can’t have her then no-one will”. He hired thugs to throw acid into her eyes. What happened years later, after Bert’s release from jail, is quite beyond belief.Some people already know or recall this true story (it dominated US newspapers for some time), but I don’t want to reveal its ending. You may be as surprised as I was to discover just how things panned out between these two people..
Dan Klores has shot a number of award-winning docos and this one has garnered the top award at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. It is certainly nothing less than fascinating and full credit to Flores for the way he deftly interweaves talking heads, archival footage and fabulous music. The talking heads comprise Bert and Linda themselves and also a number of people who knew and still know the couple. All talk openly about how they saw things back then and today. Their words shed interesting light on how men and women perceived themselves back in the 1950s – to be a lawyer was the pinnacle of achievement for men and most women were dependent upon their spouses as their only security in life. Klores doesn’t intrude, he simply lets the interviewees talk and manages to get them to open up quite remarkably. When listening to Bert I was almost reminded of the paedophile priest in Deliver Us From Evil who seems to have little sense of the depth of the wrong he did. Bert comes across as a very warped character, in fact both he and Linda do, and it’s to Klores’s credit that he manages to take us on a journey that has us fully believing something that is almost impossible to believe! This he achieves by taking the time to allow the main players to reveal fully where they were coming from emotionally during all the drama.
It was fortunate that there were obviously plenty of old home movie footage and photos available to Klores. These he uses seamlessly to give a very immediate feel to the story. Through countless still shots we see what a beautiful woman Linda really was and how Bert was an eminent catch being a wealthy lawyer, owning an aeroplane, fancy cars and with all the associated glamour of his social standing. We see them dressed up for dates and we see how handsome was Linda’s fiancé, Larry Schwartz. Tabloid papers were a big part of life then so Flores also makes good use of headlines which help evoke the shock that the case had on the general public. The 50s also had their own burgeoning notion of independence and breaking out and by his use of the iconic music of the time Klores really takes us back to that era and the decades that followed, really adding to the film’s authentic energy.
Ultimately what really shocks is the ever-surprising insight into the strange nature of the human heart – love, desire, obsession, revenge, forgiveness – they are all here in this fascinating story that will take you for an energetic and astonishing ride with two people who could be described best with the evocative Yiddish word “meshuganahs”!
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