User Reviews

At first, this completely bizarre Ivan Passer film seems like it's going to be an intriguing if fairly routine drama about insider trading. Omar Sharif plays Andre Ferren, a completely corrupt European businessman who's been cooking the books and gets caught out by an auditor. He's enamored of co-worker Susan Winters (Karen Black, quite charming even when decked out in '70s era non-finery), and convinces her to help him out by wedding a wealthy industrialist (Bernhard Wicki) for his money. Things get progressively stranger as Susan hooks up with an American cowboy (the hopelessly boring Joseph Bottoms) and drags him off to a hillside castle, whilst the eternally priapic Andre has an unfortunate encounter with a masseuse (Elma Karlowa from Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul). This is not a particularly good film, but it isn't boring and it certainly defies expectations.

Ivan Passer's Crime and Passion shares some distinct similarities with his following film Silver Bears -they're both set in the world of European finance, with a risk-taking protagonist facing off against better equipped forces, sharing a pragmatic view of sexual relations. It would be tempting to say that Silver Bears, a far more conventionally unified and easy-to-take entertainment, represents "getting it right," casting Crime and Passion as something of a failed dry run. But the film's failure is rather sadder than that, for its hints of a darker, more transgressive vision that just got away. It's evident at the start, depicting how Omar Sharif's financier protagonist, Andre Ferren, is sexually excited (to the point of utter recklessness) at the prospect of financial disgrace, shortly afterwards conniving with his girlfriend and co-worker (Karen Black) to have her marry their richest client, for which they fatten her up on pastries to make her more to the client's liking. But from the outset, the premise never bites as it should, not helped by the casting, or by the constant sense of being marooned in unproductively pretty settings. Actually, large parts of the film - such as Ferren narrowly escaping from improbable assassins including a man on skis and an overweight masseuse, or the later goings on in a supposedly haunted castle - bring to mind the second-wave Pink Panther films of the same period, although its interest in obsessive surveillance and voyeurism connects more deeply, and the ending - in which the characters nihilistically submit to desire but then are saved through a chilling twist of fate - evokes what might have been. Passer presumably intended his film to be more fully defined by a sense of risk and freedom, of psychologically and narratively living on the edge, and as such its failure at least somewhat reflects Ferren's likely nightmare, the bankrupting results of cravenly hedging one's bets.

Some fantastic European location footage and well done skiing sequences can't hide the fact that this is one of the lamest thrillers ever made, with one of the creepiest characters ever to lead. Omar Sharif is a prominent businessman which happens to be a serial cheater and most likely am embezzler, which of course he denies like a cornered child when confronted. Tired of his cheating, wife Karen Black decides she's going to let young hick Joseph Bottoms fly her plane, taking him to a creepy castle, and stalked by her husband.

This is one of those very odd 1970's European English language movies that stars took for a nice working vacation in an exotic place, knowing that it wouldn't get any awards let alone get a major release anyway. Sharif really plays a pig of a character, just grabbing young pretty servant girls and hotel maids and ravaging them as if they were begging him to. Black and Bottoms have one of the dullest seduction scenes ever, with its depiction of a older woman and younger man who seem like mother and son, not passionate lovers.

There's some suspense about someone trying to kill him and some comedy with the massage he's expecting performed by an enormous Amazon with her breasts flopping out, a poor redo of a classic movie sequence with Richard Conte and Hope Emerson in "Cry of the City". Black is absolutely dull here, and Bottoms stuck with a truly dumb character that is totally unbelievable. Ultimately pointless, although I'll give it credit for taking me on a cinematic vacation to a place I'll never get to in person. Gave me a few laughs however, mainly at its expense.