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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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When the morose con man Raymond Fernandez (Jared Leto) puts on a thick dark toupee and a white suit, his eyes come alive and he turns into a fantasy Latin lover--a pocket-size Cesar Romero, complete with pencil-line mustache and dazzling smile. Ray, one of two murderers in the superb nineteen-forties true-crime story "Lonely Hearts," finds his prospective victims in the personals sections of newspapers. He corresponds with the women for months, offering tenderness and poetry before meeting, romancing, fleecing, abandoning, and, in some cases, murdering them. How can Ray make out so well? Like many dedicated male narcissists, he's initially aroused not by the women but by their interest in him, but then, in return, he offers good value--he's all attention, and tireless. The hustle becomes even more perverse when Ray links up with a former nurse, Martha Beck (Salma Hayek), an eruptive little beauty who poses as Ray's sister and accompanies him and his latest woman everywhere. Martha, it seems, believes that she and Ray are having the love affair of the ages; she's jealous of Ray's attentions to the others, and eventually she loses patience with the scam and does in his girlfriends herself.
The real-life Fernandez and Beck rolled around Long Island and Michigan for a couple of years, and may have murdered as many as seventeen people....
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