Crime and Passion (1976)

'Ace Up My Sleeve' - or as it sometimes known, 'Crime and Punishment' - this Ivan Passer thriller stars Omar Sharif as man in financial strife who encourages his mistress to marry an elderly millionaire with the hopes of a lucrative divorce settlement, but the upper hand that the lovers think they have is not as it seems. The first fifteen minutes or so of the movie are quite enticing with Sharif and lead actress Karen Black getting into intimate plotting while their target, unbeknownst to them, watches on hidden cameras from afar. Starting with a bizarre, borderline comical patisserie scene, however, in which Black gluttonously overeats (to make herself more attractive to the old man who likes full-bodied women), the plot soon derails and manages to inject relatively little sense of danger and paranoia in the air later on even after Black discovers that the old man has killed every ex- wife who left him and as Sharif finds attempts on his own life. The role that Joseph Bottoms has in the film is also downright weird, becoming a third love interest for Black in a subplot that only seems to exist to suggest that Black is less honorable than Sharif first thought. Even if the story does not quite add up, Passer films the material so thoughtfully that it is a hard movie to overlook. One of the best touches is how Sharif's face is totally obscured by shadows as he watches the bride and groom cut the cake; there are also some remarkable shots that literally slide down a ski slope. Vangelis additionally provides yet another memorable composition that appropriately adds much tension at several key points.

At first, this completely bizarre Ivan Passer film seems like it's going to be an intriguing if fairly routine drama about insider trading. Omar Sharif plays Andre Ferren, a completely corrupt European businessman who's been cooking the books and gets caught out by an auditor. He's enamored of co-worker Susan Winters (Karen Black, quite charming even when decked out in '70s era non-finery), and convinces her to help him out by wedding a wealthy industrialist (Bernhard Wicki) for his money. Things get progressively stranger as Susan hooks up with an American cowboy (the hopelessly boring Joseph Bottoms) and drags him off to a hillside castle, whilst the eternally priapic Andre has an unfortunate encounter with a masseuse (Elma Karlowa from Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul). This is not a particularly good film, but it isn't boring and it certainly defies expectations.

It's really unbelievable, how Ivan Passer, director, who has proved his talent several times, could shoot so stupid movie and waste talents of the actors, composer as well as the writer of the original story. This film is a true example of how to mess up just ANYTHING that could have been done wrong on a film. Story is being told in a way that even a horror enthusiast kid would not believe any single situation. Actors are playing so poorly, that I was asking thousand times how the hell could any director let these particular actors act so bad. Don't waste even a single minute watching this stupid caricature of a feature film. What a shame for the director!

Pretty awful. This film contains the trinity of bad movies - bad story, bad acting and bad camerawork. After 10 minutes I was ready for the film to end. Joe Bottoms' brothers can act but in this film it is apparent that Joe can only ski well. Vangelis' score was good but it seemed like it belonged in another film and not this one. As for the ending - who knows? The only good thing about this movie was the cannon sequence but even that brings up a lot of questions, the main one being - are cannons in old castles usually left loaded? Just one problem out of many.