Crazy Love

Last week, I went to see the film Crazy Love at the Westgate Arts Cinema. Co-directed by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens, it’s a documentary about an obsessive and twisted love affair between Burt Pugach and Linda Riss. The movie was featured at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and although I didn’t get the chance to catch it there, it has been on my list of “must sees” since hearing about it there.

Intermixed with present-day interviews with Burt and Linda, the movie begins with footage from the 1950’s and the story of their early love affair. Linda is a strikingly beautiful twenty year-old vixen, and Burt a successful lawyer who makes his fortune as a pioneer ambulance chaser. Burt explains that, immediately after laying eyes on Linda, he had to have her and immediately took to courting her. Linda, a good-girl type who grew up with a tough family life and bouts of poverty, is enamored with Burt’s big life—the glamorous nightlife, mixing with celebrities, and his constant attention. However, when she finds out that he is already married, she promptly ends their relationship when it becomes apparent that he will never leave his wife. Burt can not accept the breakup, and his love quickly turns destructive with stalking, constant phone calls, and threats. Despite all of this, Linda moves on, and eventually becomes engaged to another man. In an act of psychotic rage, with the reasoning that if I can’t have her, no one can, Burt hires three thugs to throw acid in Linda’s face, a devastating crime that leaves her blinded for life, and quickly brings an end to her engagement.

And as if this weren't enough, Burt writes love letters to Linda while he is incarcerated, and after he is released from jail in 1971, he proposes to Linda, who astonishingly accepts. They have been married ever since. Their life in the 1970's, a glamorous whirlwind of talk-show appearances and other media attention. It’s an unbelievable, but still somehow predictable, destructive co-dependency that I found deeply fascinating. I liked the film—their relationship is obviously sad, sick, and twisted, but at the end of the movie it shows the two in the present day, and they seem content. Which makes me think.