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In Crimes of Passion (1984), Kathleen Turner is leading a double life. By day, she’s Joanna Crane, a matter-of-fact fashion-house executive who wears ties and tightly collared button-ups and is looked at by her boss as threatening because she is work-focused, keeps to herself, and is a recent divorcée. By night, Joanna is China Blue, a bubblegum-chewing sex worker who swivels in a platinum blonde-banged wig and a baby-blue silk dress down the sidewalks of her city’s red-light district. She’s going for XXX Cinderella. China Blue’s specialty is an adeptness at role-playing; if you want her to take the part of a flirtatious flight attendant, or let you live out a rape fantasy complete with some simulated stalking, she’ll do it, no problem. She charges $50 minimum, and may let you go home with a prop from your night together if you nicely request it alongside a $10 bill; the movie, though, suggests Joanna is doing this less as a financial necessity and more a mode of expression. 

Joanna becomes a matter of interest in Crimes of Passion, Ken Russell’s characteristically indefatigable erotic thriller, because the fashion house’s CEO has noticed a concerning uptick in lost sales recently. He thinks somebody in the company is clandestinely selling patterns to competitors. It must be Joanna, he believes, because she “turns to ice” whenever a man is around and because she’s ambitious in a way that, to him, suggests wickedness. The CEO hires Bobby Grady (John Laughlin), a suburban electronics-store owner who does surveillance work as a side hustle, to follow her.

There isn’t any truth to the CEO’s fears, Bobby quickly finds. But after the job has finished (a different offender reveals himself), Bobby still keeps his eyes on China Blue. He’s intrigued; eventually he solicits her services. Bobby wants it to be a one-night thing, a salve for the itching curiosities sparked by his voyeurism. He has a couple of kids with his high-school sweetheart wife, Amy (Annie Potts), back at home; he doesn’t want to abandon his life. But his time in Joanna’s rented room — summarized in montage by funny-suggestive projections of the various sex positions they try as shadows on the wall — only aggravates a domestic unhappiness that’s been there for a while but gone unaddressed. Amy never wants to have sex and is always worried about money. Her and Bobby’s civility is becoming tenuous, too, brutally exemplified in one scene where Amy shares a funny story and Bobby doesn’t notice that this is a perfect moment to offer if not a polite laugh then at least some pity-amusement. 

Working off a screenplay by Barry Sandler, who also produced the movie, what emerges in Crimes of Passion isn’t quite an unlikely romance between the square-ish Bobby and the wilder Joanna — though the rendezvouses continue — but a tendency to use the characters (with another important one, played by a hopped-up Anthony Perkins, being a fraudulent, poppers-sniffing preacher so obsessed with “saving” China Blue that it seems increasingly likely that means killing her) as living channels through which to examine sexual liberation and domestic assimilation. It as much takes seriously what’s positive about both as it does where their spiritual shortcomings lie.

Kathleen Turner in Crimes of Passion.

Crimes of Passion doesn’t have any particularly illuminating insights, especially around suburban malaise. Scenes defined by the latter are mostly reductive of other domestic dramas. The moments where Amy and Bobby have over their longtime friends, though, are striking: they have that dreadful uncertainty you notice more as you get older whether you’re still friends with someone because they’re around and you have a history to maintain or do still genuinely like them.

Crimes of Passion annoyingly gives in to the trope of sex work being something from which a woman ought to be rescued by a clean-cut, financially sound man who loves her. (The movie doesn’t completely paint Joanna as a damsel in distress, though: even if it uses Bobby as a tool to “tame” her, it doesn’t belittle her autonomy or her desires.) But its images, as one expects from a Russell movie, have a beautifully seedy charge. Anything with neon here is ravishing to look at. They nicely augment the anything-goes baroqueness that goes on in China Blue’s room as opposed to the sterile, more beige and manicured look of the repression-defined suburban scenes. 

Perkins’ and Turner’s performances have a thrilling chutzpah; Crimes of Passion is at its best when it finds these actors alone. Their dialogues have an almost musical quality — like if a romantic duet suddenly turned hostile. They’re flurries of teasing double entendres; the actors deliver them with a proper union of seriousness and cheek. They seem most aligned with Russell’s joking, histrionic style; Perkins’ performance especially is about as flooring as the career-defining one he gave in Psycho (1960). 

That can’t be said for Laughlin, who, though visually perfect as a one-time varsity quarterback who still has his athletic physique but little remaining of the old eagerness for the life that awaited him, can’t figure out how to give a distinctive flavor to the domestic blandness he has to reify. Crimes of Passion’s electricity fizzles when he centers a given scene; he’s unfortunately in a lot of them. But any other time, this is a mostly interesting, welcomely idiosyncratic satire of the sexual mores du jour and how its characters navigate them in a gassed-up world of Russell’s making.