Continuing an occasional series about artworks in feature films. I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks working my way through the Ken Russell filmography, rewatching familiar documentaries and feature films while acquainting myself with the portions of the Russell oeuvre that I’d missed in the past. Crimes of Passion (1984) was a film that I did see when it turned up on video in the late 1980s but I didn’t remember much about it apart from its overheated erotic atmosphere and a red/blue lighting scheme. It’s not one of Russell’s best—the script lurches uncomfortably between mundane domestic drama and lurid, sex-crazed delirium; Rick Wakeman’s synthesizer score is persistently annoying—but it does feature spirited performances by the lead actors, Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins.
Turner is Joanna Crane, a swimwear designer who deals with the vacuity of her life by moonlighting as an in-demand prostitute named China Blue. (The polite term “sex worker” didn’t exist in the 1980s.) Russell delivers the art references early on, with unexpected cuts to erotic figures from Aubrey Beardsley’s Lysistrata (above), various Japanese shunga prints, and a flash of The Rape by René Magritte. Since the real woman behind the China Blue persona isn’t revealed until later in the film we don’t know at first that Joanna Crane’s apartment contains reproductions of some of the same pictures. She eventually admits to thinking of them during stressful moments.
Despite this admission, there’s nothing in the script of Crimes of Passion that warrants the references, Crane’s apartment could easily have been furnished in a blandly expensive manner suited to a successful designer. The only other character who seems remotely interested in art is Anthony Perkins’ Reverend Shayne, a splenetic, sex-obsessed preacher who has a hotel room next door to China Blue. In one of several references to Psycho, Shayne watches his neighbour’s erotic encounters through a spyhole. The walls of his own room are covered in a collage of religious and pornographic imagery but little is made of this.
The Lovers by René Magritte.
Joanna Crane and Bobby Grady (John Laughlin) in Joanna’s apartment. Among the pictures on the walls are Romeo and Juliet by Marc Chagall, The Embrace by Gustav Klimt, and The Kiss by Gustav Klimt.
I’d guess that Russell rather than writer Barry Sandler was responsible for the art inserts. In addition to showing us something of Joanna Crane’s inner life (such as it is) the artworks also embellish the unprepossessing material that Russell had been offered. Russell used Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings a few years later in Salome’s Last Dance, while one of the paintings that China Blue brings to mind, Ophelia by Millais, is shown as a work in progress in Dante’s Inferno, Russell’s TV film about the Pre-Raphaelites. Leaving aside Savage Messiah, Russell’s feature about sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, other notable art references may be found in Song of Summer (paintings by Edvard Munch), Billion Dollar Brain (paintings by Gallen-Kallela), Mahler (a series of Gustave Doré engravings), and Gothic (Fuseli’s The Nightmare which appears in painted form then in a dream sequence, as I noted here).
Aubrey Beardsley’s Lacedaemonian Ambassadors from Lysistrata being threatened with a whipping by the woman in the frontispiece for A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender.
On the subject of embellishing weak material, there’s a coincidental parallel to the previous film addressed in this series, The Medusa Touch. The paintings that surround John Morlar and Joanna Crane are presented as emblems of a psychological torment that finds expression in the outside world; Morlar and Crane also favour René Magritte in their artistic selections. In both films all the references are unattributed even though the pictures fill the screen at times.
Ophelia by Millais.
Klimt’s Kiss again.
The Dancer’s Reward from Salomé by Aubrey Beardsley.
Just before the climactic encounter between Crane and Shayne we see Joanna rearranging the Beardsley prints on her apartment wall. I had an idea once of trying to compile a list of Beardsley artwork appearances in other film and TV productions but Crimes of Passion shows the futility of such an endeavour. For a start it was so long since I’d seen this film that I’d forgotten there was any Beardsley in it, while the film itself is an example of the way that Beardsley’s work can appear in unlikely places. As with the print that turns up in the dreadful Carry On Loving, you never know where else his drawings may be hiding.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Art on film: The Medusa Touch
• Art on film: Crack-Up
• Art on film: The Dark Corner
• Art on film: Je t’aime, Je t’aime
• Art on film: Space is the Place
• Art on film: Providence
• Art on film: The Beast