Crazy Love

Dan Klores
U.S., 2007
English
91 minutes • Color
Distribution: Magnolia Pictures
Co-director: Fisher Stevens
Cinematography: Wolfgang Held
Music: Douglas J. Cuomo
Principal Cast: Burt Pugach, Linda Pugach

SHOWTIMES:
Sat Apr 28 6:00 pm Indy Men’s Magazine Screening Room (Landmark)

Tues May 1 6:00 pm WTTS Screening Room (Landmark)

Burt Pugach and Linda Riss were just two New Yorkers when they started dating in 1957 — she a beautiful working girl, he a nebbishy but lucrative lawyer — but over the next three decades they became America’s most bizarre couple, riding their up-anddown rollercoaster of a relationship in the face of wary friends, criminal accusations, and the bewildered, yet fascinated public.

Director Dan Klores explores this peculiar romance in Crazy Love, a vivid and engrossing portrait of obsessive love and attachment that layers archival photos, music, and media with firsthand accounts from Burt, Linda, and their baffled friends. Without giving away the film’s gut-punch (though many still remember the headline-worthy pair from tabloids and talk shows), this is a couple that should not be together or happy under any circumstances — yet they are, for reasons that are seemly impossible to comprehend.

Burt, now an old man, recounts his lifelong love for Linda in ways so passionate and heartfelt that one could maybe understand just how he could have hurt the woman he loved so terribly. Then again, even Burt’s friends admit he’s a bit of a kook — others call him disturbed and psychopathic — and seem to embrace his moral ambiguity as a personality quirk. “Even Hitler had friends,” one pal jokes. Klores makes good use of the candor of his subjects, who address the camera and spill their thoughts and feelings on events dating back three decades. He also makes great musical choices, using songs that at once evoke an era and reflect the mental state of lovers in the throes of affection, detachment, and obsession.