No Denying the Truth in Crazy Love

For those that think Days of Our Lives is full of odd twists and turns, I give you the utterly truth-is-stranger-than-fiction (far, far, far stranger) documentary Crazy Love. Director Dan Klores doesn’t just present a loony love affair worthy of Jerry Springer, he also crafts one of the most laugh out loud funny and jaw-droppingly audacious 92-minutes I’ve ever seen.

New Yorkers Burt Pugach and Linda Riss met one another in the early fall of 1957. He was a successful 30-year-old lawyer, she a 20-year-old office worker with perfect skin and a ruby-red smile. When they begin to date, everything seems great, at least until Linda discovers Burt is actually married to another woman even though he’s constantly expressing his eternal love to her.

By 1958 Linda has given Burt the ultimatum. But the ambulance chaser has no intention of leaving his wife (she won’t divorce him), enlisting friends and coworkers to help him woo this young girl supposedly of his dreams even if he can’t ever marry her. The two break-up, make up and break-up again, Linda finally having enough and by the end of the year begins to date friend and military veteran Larry Schwartz.

Soon they are engaged to be married, a thing Burt just can’t let happen. If he can’t have Linda, no one will, and personal injury lawyer hiring a trio of thugs to make sure and impress that point upon his lady love in as forceful a way as possible. Which they do, one of them blinding the poor woman by throwing a mayonnaise jar filed with Lye right square in the middle of her face on the family’s doorstep after pretending to be a group of delivery men.

Here’s where things get truly weird. Burt goes to jail (after unsuccessfully defending himself) and Linda tries to move on with her life. Burt is freed in 1974 on parole, going on television still professing his love for the woman and asking her to marry him. The pair meet, talk, fight, make-up and are subsequently married in November f 1974. They have been together ever since, Linda even forgiving Burt for an affair with another woman in 1996, another woman her husband supposedly stalked and threatened much in the very same way he did to her almost four decades in the past.

All this really happened. Every bit of it is true. You can actually go online and Google many of the stories and articles that appeared in newspapers throughout New York and the rest of the country of you don’t believe me. Walking out of the theater, I thought at least part of this had to be fiction. At least some of it had to be false. But none of it is, Crazy Love a one of a kind marvel depicting a story so bizarre and out of this world I must have slapped my own forehead a half-dozen or so times in the theater in utter disbelief watching it unfold.

Klores interviews Linda, Burt, their childhood friends, reporters covering the case and subsequent biographers who have followed their story for decades. It is all masterfully done, the film breezing by in a nanosecond as it whirls around and around and around into a vortex of love, hate, love, hate and then finally love (sprinkled with just a modicum of hate). I couldn’t take my eyes off of it, and just when I thought the story couldn’t get any weirder low and behold here comes another twist of fate which dropped my jaw right onto the multiplex floor.

Let’s be clear. My life was not changed by this documentary. The human condition was not illuminated in some deep or powerful way. The whole story is tabloid television splashed across a cinema screen. But so what? This is one of the most entertaining films I’ve seen all year, Burt and Linda’s story so shocking and unconventional I couldn’t believe my eyes. This is a great documentary, Crazy Love a true original impossible to resist.

Film Rating:  êêê1/2  (out of 4)