Part Time Prostitute Problems

How many successful young workaholic women are prostitutes in their spare time? I can't imagine very many but that's Kathleen Turner's lifestyle in 1984's Crimes of Passion. Directed by Ken Russell, it's called an "erotic thriller" but it plays more like a watered down John Waters film, concerned more with not especially insightful satire than with thrills. It is erotic, not in the intimate, slow burn way of Body Heat but in the way of a Playboy cartoon.

Bobby (John Laughlin) thinks he's happily married to Amy (Annie Potts), a humourless woman who desultorily rebuffs all his attempts at sexual solicitation or affection (a real waste of Annie Potts). One day, he gets a job following a tenacious career woman called Joanna (Kathleen Turner) to find out what she does at night. Turns out, she moonlights as a prostitute called China Blue.

She has a stalker played by Anthony Perkins who piles shaming, religious rhetoric on her when he's not paying for sex. A lot of the movie feels like a stage play when Perkins and she take turns strutting around each other, delivering monologues about sex and roleplay on lurid sets with lurid lighting. The conflict here is between religious hypocrisy and the potential hollowness of women's sexual liberation. It's all obvious and ham-fisted, the worst being a climax of sorts when Joanna is paid to have sex with a dying man.

Russell rushes through the scene at an odd pace as though he knew the argument he was presenting had no substance but he couldn't be bothered to think of anything else. Like a kid rushing through a book report on the night before it was due.

China Blue has great wallpaper. Turner gives a good performance and sometimes it is fun watching her and Perkins play off each other. Laughlin is a total bore and I was not interested in him being the sexual saviour for Joanna that Russell wanted him to be.

Crimes of Passion is available on The Criterion Channel.

Counterfeit Heat

I wonder if Kathleen Turner in 1981's Body Heat is the original '80s femme fatale. Watching it last night, I thought of my recent viewing of Black Widow and how cold Theresa Russell is in that movie. These femmes fatale are reptilian in a way they never were in the golden era of noir. Writer/director Lawrence Kasdan obviously drew primarily from Double Indemnity but while Barbara Stanwyck is certainly murderous, manipulative, and avaricious, you don't come away with the impression you never saw for sure her true feelings. Turner's character, Matty, is such a complete enigma by the end of the film it's almost a horror movie. I would say she's closer to Bram Stoker's conception of Dracula than a '40s style femme fatale. The main reason for this is how successful Kasdan, Turner, and William Hurt are at conveying a sense of irresistible sexual passion in the first part of the film.

The dialogue is an emulation of the classic noir, highly stylised back and forth. Chandlerian but not quite "How fast was I driving" Chandlerian. But it still gives a real sense of two people navigating their sexual needs in dialogue. Hurt is insistent yet playful, Turner is cool but fervent. The idea that she felt absolutely nothing for him, enough to casually betray him, almost seems like a paranoid conspiracy theory. Or, indeed, like misogyny. An impression given credence by another odd difference between this and old noir--Hurt's character is surrounded by a really caring network of guys. Even his rival attorney played by Ted Danson cares enough about him to give him thinly veiled warnings about an investigation being conducted on him. Mickey Rourke, in his breakout role, is a criminal, a demolitions guy, whom Hurt had helped stay out of prison. Even that doesn't quite explain the deep concern Rourke evidently feels for him, enough that he goes out of his way to warn Hurt about danger.

Kasdan's dialogue really is clever, though, and the performances are great. The movie's good enough I watched it in dribs and drabs last night, struggling to get HBOMax to stream. It took about three hours to watch the two hour movie. I got screenshots from YouTube trailers and clips to-day. I'm so done trying to use HBOMax.