Crazy Love

2007, 92 minutes, documentary, directed by Dan Kloyes, US
The opening scene of Crazy Love has Linda Riss staring into the camera behind dark glasses that look like part of a Cat Woman costume, a lacquered wig perched on her head. It’s an appropriate beginning for a documentary that takes on such a bizarre tale. In 1959 Riss met Burt Pugach, a married lawyer who had grown up poor, but found success as an ambulance-chasing attorney. He owned a plane, a powder-blue Cadillac convertible, and a Manhattan nightclub, where he instructed the house band to play “Linda” when he and Riss made their entrance. “He loved her. She was impressed by him,” says a friend of Riss’s.

Riss was not a woman at odds with the time and place into which she had been born. She was eager to marry and when it became clear that Pugach would never leave his wife she broke up with him and found marriage material in the form of Larry Schwartz, a serviceman whom she’d met on a vacation in Florida a few years earlier. When he heard about the engagement an unraveling Pugach dispatched two thugs to knock on her front door and throw lye in her face. Nearly blinded by the attack, Riss spent months in the hospital and Schwartz called off the engagement. Pugach, who was also the target of a federal corruption investigation, was apprehended and sent to jail for over a decade.

Then it really got weird. When Pugach was released from prison, he and Linda rekindled the relationship and eventually married.

A story as sensational and bizarre as this can easily start to feel leaden after its initial shock wears off and there were moments when the movie bordered on tiresome. Overall though, director Dan Kloyes maintains a deft touch that kept me hooked in to if not riveted by the film. It also helps that within this obviously grim tale is plenty of humor. Most of the interviewees seem like caricatures of fifties-era, working-class New Yorkers decamped to Florida. Leathery and matter-of-fact they seem like kitschy artifacts from an America that had not yet come into full awareness of itself.

Of course, this is a sad and disturbing story and when I think about exactly why it’s so, I come to something other than the attack—ghastly as it was. What I think of is the chorus of friends who encouraged Riss to go back to Pugach. One—a former policewoman who had been assigned to guard Riss in the hospital—recalls seeing an elderly woman returning home with grocery bags stuffed with single-serving items. “It wreaked of loneliness,” she says when she explains why she urged Riss to meet with the newly freed Pugach. Riss, who considered herself “damaged goods” was starting to age. Totally blind, she was unable to work and lived a solitary life in her small New York apartment. Marriage it seemed to her and some in her circle was the only hope of salvaging her life and as damaged goods the choices were few. It’s an equation informed by among other things rigid notions of gender and minds unwilling or unable to question them. Yet, taken in its time and place there’s an undeniable and stomach-flipping logic to it. It’s pragmatism unleavened by imagination. “He takes care of her” said a cousin, “I mean who else is going to run for her?” Good point, sadly.