In the summer of 1959, the nation was shocked when twenty year old Linda Riss was attacked, blinded, and disfigured on the front steps of her home in the Bronx. The story became a sensation when it was discovered that the man behind the attack was Linda’s ex boyfriend, thirty two year old, married, New York attorney, Burt Plugach, who’d devised the assault so that no other man could have the woman he’d lost. Crazy Love is director Dan Klores’ effort to recount the history of the romance, the violence, and the madness that eventually unfolded when Linda actually married Burt.
The perspective in Crazy Love is handed over to the people who lived through the insanity between Burt and Linda Plugach first hand: the couple’s friends, relatives, doctors, protectors, and of course Burt and Linda themselves. And while the cast of characters are certainly a colorful ensemble of heavily made up and bespectacled wrinkly faces, their insight into the Plugachs’ story is mostly limited and cliché. Linda is described as having “looked just like a painting”, her most striking feature, of course, were her beautiful brown eyes.
Certainly it was much more interesting to hear the accounts of Burt and Linda, today 79 and 68. He sat rather smugly in suited silk shirt and handkerchief; she smoked incessantly, perhaps four or five long, skinny cigarettes held between silver polished fingers throughout the film. Linda wore rhinestone embellished, black plastic sunglasses that completely befit her overly ornate style. Had a viewer gone into this movie “blind” they may not have had any idea that she was wearing them for any reason other than that they made her look like a total diva.
Together, they disjointedly recounted their story: their childhoods, their chance meeting, his unhappy marriage, their attitudes toward sex, his obsession with her, her obsession with his money. And as one watches Crazy Love, one wants to ask, “Who’s crazier? Him or her?”
Ironically, I’m not quite sure Crazy Love gives the audience enough craziness to make a decision either way. Narrated over a shifting collage of news paper clippings surrounding her attack, his trial, and their eventual marriage to each other, the content of Crazy Love is mostly a collection of the cultural artifacts surrounding the relationship and not the relationship itself. There were plenty of photographs of Burt and Linda hob knobbing with his celebrity friends, but relatively few which detailed things like the extent of her injuries. Perhaps though, it is I who am crazy for demanding more grotesque craziness.
Linda looked just like Elizabeth Taylor. I find she rather acted like her too. This brings me to the biggest criticism I’ve got for Crazy Love: its title. Had I been Klores, I would have stuck with something more along the lines of Money Love or Attention Love, perhaps Self Love or Vanity Love. Where a bond of Crazy Love seems to imply a reckless, devoted passion between two people, Linda and Burt Plugach’s relationship seems only a common selfishness. There is little craziness evident in Burt and Linda’s descriptions of their relationship. She spoke about marriage and dating in terms of the “market place” and trying not to let a potential “catch” fall through her fingers. In the end she married the man because of his financial security and because he was the only one who would always think her beautiful. And Burt had very rational explanations for his psychotic behavior inside and outside of jail: “I slit my wrists to get a mistrial.”
This movie is to film what the National Enquire is to great literature – a cheap substitute for real drama. I call Burt and Linda just an elder Britney and K Fed and the movie that chronicles them just a cinematic US Weekly. The film’s creepy music can’t come close to overpowering the silly images of Burt and Linda bickering over a dinner outing in their matching fur coats. I believe this movie achieved, at least in this critic’s opinion, the very opposite effect it was going for. It introduced the possibility that what I would have ordinarily regarded as a disturbing historical event may well have been an attention seeking publicity stunt. In the end, Crazy Love is really little more than a melodramatic rag mag.
Liz Licorish
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