Crazy Love (2007)

Boy meets girl.

Boy loves girl.

Boy loses girl.

Girl meets someone else.

Boy commits despicable act of spite and jealousy.

Boy resolves to win girl back … once he serves out his prison sentence, that is.

The riveting documentary Crazy Love packs all the thrills, poignancy and dark humor of the most enthralling work of fiction.

Our tale begins in the Bronx one September afternoon in 1957, when 32-year-old Burt Pugach meets raven-haired beauty Linda Riss. For Burt, a gawky but wildly successful New York personal-injury attorney, it was obsession at first sight. Linda was gorgeous and more than 10 years Burt’s junior, but the attorney was nothing if not tenacious. He lavished Linda with attention, gifts and money, flying her around in his private airplane and fussing over her at a nightclub he co-owned. The house band was instructed to strike up the tune “Linda” whenever she entered the joint.

So began an intoxicating whirlwind romance that lasted until Linda found out that her suitor also had a wife and child. She abruptly broke off the affair. Burt begged Linda for another chance. She hedged. Burt assured her he would get a divorce, and for proof he presented Linda with divorce papers that turned out to be forgeries.

It was the last straw for Linda. She again kicked Burt to the curb and got engaged to a handsome hunk she had met during a vacation in Florida.

But Pugach, no gracious loser in affairs of the heart, knew a few things about personal injury. In the summer of 1959, he hired three thugs to toss lye in Linda’s face, an attack that left her blinded and disfigured. Burt received a 30-year prison sentence, of which he would serve 14 behind bars.

And yet that was far from the end of the story. Although the long, strange trip of Burt Pugach and Linda Riss is well-documented, revealing more here would do a disservice to some of the twists in this remarkable film. Suffice it to say, there is a happy ending … of sorts.

Directors Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens let the narrative unfold through separate interviews with Burt and Linda, as well as a gaggle of their friends and relatives. The documentary employs a wealth of footage – home movies, vintage photos, newsreels – along with an evocative soundtrack of pop songs from the period.

Crazy Love is sensationalistic enough all on its own, but Klores, among Manhattan’s most celebrated public-relations wizards, knows how to build suspense by disclosing new information in tantalizing dribbles. It is brilliant storytelling, and all the more impressive because it feels so seamless.

There is a freak show aspect to Crazy Love, but at its core are universal feelings of obsession, despair and loneliness. Linda is undoubtedly reluctant to admit it, but her ultimate fate is more about insecurity than it is about the whims of a sadistic creep (although it is certainly about that, too). On its surface, Crazy Love is a tabloid tale, but it is likely to linger in your memory because of the implications it has for us all.