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Body Double required only modest trimming to fit into the movie industry's R rating. Crimes of Passion nearly underwent evisceration. This story of a demure dress designer (Kathleen Turner) who is an uninhibited hooker by night was submitted four times to the ratings board. It finally received an R only after one entire sequence (involving the prostitute, a policeman and his nightstick), several other shots and some lines of dialogue were removed. (Wanted: a new rating, between R and X, for serious nonporn sex films. How about an S?) Even now, it is one steamy, and perversely compelling, picture, earning laughs halfway between a derisive snort and the bark of astonishment. Within the film's first few minutes, Russell and Screenwriter Barry Sandier have thrown every visual, verbal and sexual excess at the viewer. A played-out stripper dances while men masturbate at peepholes and a deranged preacher (Anthony Perkins) imagines her dead on the floor. The hooker dresses up in a tiara and a blue satin gown to play a beauty-pageant contender with an unusual talent. Neon flares like a headache in hell, and the screen seems caked with guilt and sweat.
At heart (and it has one), Crimes of Passion is about the sad, sybaritic pleasures embraced by men too old to grow up. And the hooker-dominatrix is really a dark angel who gives herself whole-bodied to her clients' midnight dreams. No less, Turner throws herself headfirst into the film, hyperventilating on the medium's potential for erogenous adventure. This is a clever, daring, mad performance in a movie that is just as reckless. Crimes of Passion and its more lurid brethren in the skin trade are not for everyone, but they should at least be available for any consenting adult to savor or condemn. The porn vigilantes ignore two important partners in a work of fiction: the filmmaker, whose point of view explains and may even criticize the violent acts he depicts; and the moviegoer, who may just be perceptive enough to realize that what is happening on screen is merely a persuasive game of let's pretend. Movies did not create the problem of sexual violence. Suppressing them will not solve it. —By Richard Corliss