***½/****
directed by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens

by Alex Jackson Dan Klores’s Crazy Love is essentially just another talking-head documentary, but my goodness what talking heads they are! At first, it seems that Klores–to echo that oft-repeated charge against pop-doc filmmakers like Errol Morris, Michael Moore, and Chris Smith–is condescending to his subjects by laying their distinctly Jewish tackiness out to be skewered. But as the picture soldiers on, any emotional detachment dissolves away: these people aren’t tactless so much as they’re simply candid. They have absolutely nothing to hide, and that openness makes it extremely difficult to categorize anybody in the film as a monster or a victim. Burt Pugach was a prominent negligence lawyer in the East Bronx; in the fall of 1957, he spotted secretary Linda Riss, fell in love with her, and successfully seduced her. When he couldn’t divorce his wife, Riss left him and got engaged to somebody else. Enraged and deeply depressed, Pugach hired some goons to rough her up. They threw acid in her face, eventually blinding her. Pugach served a stint in prison, and when he got out he proposed to Riss. She accepted–the way she figures it, she’s blind and nobody wants her or is willing to be with her except Pugach, who was the one who blinded her in the first place, explicitly so that nobody else would want her. He “wins.”