Body Heat

Undoubtedly one of the great film noir thrillers in history. Derivative but superbly stylised by director Kasdan and wonderfully realised by Hurt and Turner.

Hurt is a very great actor. He had a string of well played roles in the '80s (Kiss of the Spider Woman, Children of a lesser god, Gorky Park) but his movie career lost momentum after that. Perhaps it's difficult for a cerebral actor like him to find challenging parts. Turner is super sexy, proving that a voluptuous figure or great facial features are not essentials to be a turn on. I hear that Body Heat was her first film. She plays her role with understated confidence.

The underrated theme music too is very good. Supporting cast is effective. Really no faults with this movie. Kasdan did an accomplished job. One can't help but be disappointed that he did not make many more good movies.

Some leading critics complain that the ending was over elaborate. I disagree. I think the ending touch works well with the atmosphere and momentum of the movie towards the end. This being a genre film noir movie, the plot is typical and familiar to almost anyone, but it still has great power and the movie irresistibly sucks the viewer in. You can't but help but admire the skills of the actors and Kasdan's sophisticated direction. The music is marvelously complimentary all the way through.

Great stuff.

A lightning fast affair develops between the ultra-hot and erotic Kathleen Turner and small-time Florida attorney William Hurt in the middle of an unprecedented heatwave in "Body Heat", arguably the most under-rated and most under-appreciated movie of the 1980s. Turner is the wife of a ridiculously rich businessman (Richard Crenna) and soon an elaborate plan hatches to kill him so the duo can be together forever. Naturally there is a lot more to Turner than meets the eye (Boy that is an understatement!) and Hurt becomes trapped in a super-steamy, but also highly dangerous relationship. Will the heat be too much for him in the end and are Turner's motives as clear as they appear? "Body Heat" could best be described as "Double Indemnity" for the sexed-up 1980s crowd. The sex is excessive and intense. By the end of the picture you feel like you had known Turner and Hurt for years (even though both were relative newcomers). Writer/director Lawrence Kasdan hit a major grand-slam with his first film-making venture. He had done work writing for the "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" group of films, but this was the first project where he went exclusively out on his own. No one knew really what to make of the movie in 1981 and thus it did fair business at the box office and was indifferent with the critics (it failed any Oscar consideration). As the years pass it becomes monumentally important to modern film-making and a classic homage to film noir-styled over-excesses. Brilliantly made in every way, well-acted, superbly written and directed, "Body Heat" is one of those films that forces you to look, let your hair down and eventually loosen your collar. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

The coastal Florida town in Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat brings to mind remote colonial outposts in movies like The Letter (nearby Miami, here, seems as far away as London). A sweltering spell of weather settles down for a long roost, and the distant glow of an old hotel – a relic of the peninsula's past as an exotic getaway for northerners with money – lights the opening scene; it's been torched for the insurance, an occurrence so common as to warrant little comment.

It's a town where William Hurt, a lawyer who's neither very bright nor very scrupulous, ekes out a modest existence that seems to suit him; he can dine at the best restaurant in town once a month so long as he doesn't order an appetizer. The rest of his time he spends lazily with bourbon or beer or in bed with whoever obliges him.

Then he meets up with Kathleen Turner, who hangs around cocktail lounges when her wheeler-dealer husband (Richard Crenna) is out of town, which is a lot. After the ritual game of cat-and-mouse, Turner and Hurt kindle a torrid romance, despite the enervating heat that keeps everything else limp as dishrags. Soon, the pillow talk works around to murder....

Of course, Body Heat is a latter-day version of the story for which Double Indemnity serves as archetype: Duplicitous woman seduces lust-addled stud into killing rich older husband, then leaves him to twist slowly, slowly in the wind. There's not even enough wind to stir the chimes that festoon the porch off Turner's bedroom -- can't the rich old cuckold spring for air conditioning? Hurt and Turner are reduced to emptying the refrigerator's ice tray into the post-coital bath they share -- but Hurt's left twisting nonetheless, in one of the better updates of this ageless tale.

In her movie debut, Turner makes her deepest impression with her best asset, that dimple-Haig voice of hers, all silk and smoke (but neither she nor Kasdan, who also wrote the script, quite justify her character's long and intricate back-story of ruthless scheming). With his long, lithe college-boy's build and wife-swapper's mustache left over from the '70s, Hurt embodies the self-satisfied patsy whose zipper leads him through life. Crenna (who played this Walter Neff role in the 1973 TV remake of Double Indemnity) now takes on the role of the disposable husband, the victim (or rather, the first victim).

But it's two smaller parts that give the movie a special shine. Mickey Rourke, as the local arsonist whom Hurt once helped out of a jam, ups the voltage in his two scenes, warning the heedless Hurt, then warning him again when it's all but too late. And, as Hurt's amiable adversary in the town's tiny legal circle, Ted Danson proves surprisingly spry and intuitive an actor (and he contributes a lovely little idyll, doing a soft-shoe routine under a street lamp on a pier). There's a twist or two too many in Body Heat -- it's a bit gimmicky -- but, after watching it, you feel as though you, too, should be stripping off your clothes, if only to wring them out.

Writer/director Kasden got just about everything right in this his first feature. The dialogue crackles as befits a neo noir and John Barry's score is always there to to support or promote some wondrous visuals. Kathleen Turner is quite astonishing in this her first film. Her boldness and bravery in the sex scenes ensure that this sizzles from the off and I guess helps to draw attention away from what is really going on. William Hurt hasn't made many films before this and he too seems very relaxed and easy with regard to the nude and non nude sequences. His banter with his colleagues is as believable as his smouldering tete-a-tetes with his co-star. Mickey Rourke is effective in a key small role and the whole thing moves very well. Having seen this upon its original theatrical release, I have always held it in high regard, feeling upon this Blu-ray viewing that it didn't quite race throughout as I had 'remembered' and there seemed to be a slight imbalance on the sound. But hey - excellent film with fine performances.

Like Polanski's "Chinatown" from a few years earlier, or the more recent "L.A. Confidential", "Body Heat" can be regarded as an example of neo-noir, a film which uses modern cinema techniques while trying to capture the spirit of the classic films noirs from the forties and fifties. The plot- an unfaithful wife conspiring with her lover to murder her husband- was a noir staple, being used in "Double Indemnity" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice". Indeed, "Body Heat" is sometimes described as a remake of "Double Indemnity"- in my view inaccurately, as there are major differences between the plots of the two films. Although films noirs such as "Double Indemnity" frequently had plots which revolved around sexual passion, the moral climate of the forties and the Production Code meant that this had to be implied rather than shown explicitly on the screen. By the eighties the moral climate had become more liberal, which meant that neo-noir films could be far more explicit than their predecessors.

Matty Walker, the unhappily-married younger wife of a wealthy and successful but unsympathetic Florida businessman, becomes involved with Ned Racine, a local lawyer, and they begin a passionate affair. (There are several love scenes between William Hurt and Kathleen Turner). They plot together to murder Matty's husband Edmund in order to inherit his money. Racine, as played by William Hurt, is arrogant, swaggering and cocky. He is ambitious but lazy, a man of both dubious competence and dubious ethical standards, who keeps equally dubious company. (His associates include Mickey Rourke's arsonist). He likes to think that he is always in control of the situation, but in reality he can be easily manipulated by Matty, a classic noir femme fatale. This was Kathleen Turner's first film, but she gives a remarkably assured performance as the glamorous and seductive Matty. (To be fair, Barbara Stanwyck was equally seductive in "Double Indemnity"- an even more remarkable performance when one considers that Stanwyck, unlike Turner, did not have the assistance of nudity or sex scenes).

In the second half of the film, the plot becomes increasingly complex and difficult to follow; there is a particularly implausible final twist (which I will not reveal). Nevertheless, film noir is a genre in which atmosphere is often more important than plot ("The Big Sleep" is a good example). The same holds true for neo-noir, and "Body Heat" is a highly atmospheric film. The adjective "steamy" is often used metaphorically to mean "sexually explicit", but this film can also be described as steamy in the literal sense. The title refers to the fact that Matty is said to have a natural body temperature of 100 Fahrenheit rather than the normal 98.4 (something which doubtless explains her sexual insatiability). It also refers to the fact that the action takes place during a heatwave. The atmosphere is one of extreme heat, of sweat, of physical lassitude, of moral decay and of sexual tension, an atmosphere heightened by John Barry's mournful and highly evocative jazz score. Many scenes take place at night, and director Lawrence Kasdan succeeds in giving these a look equivalent to the classic noir look. Instead of the moody black-and-white photography characteristic of noir, Kasdan uses in these scenes a colour scheme dominated by blacks, reds and oranges, something which emphasises the feelings of heat and passion.

"Body Heat" was made in the same year as the Jack Nicholson/Jessica Lange remake of "The Postman Always Rings Twice", and the two films were often regarded as evidence of a trend in Hollywood towards a franker treatment of erotic subjects during this period. It seemed that the eighties were going to be the decade of the erotic thriller. That was not quite how things worked out in reality; the arrival of AIDS in the middle of the decade led to a revived moralism in the film industry so far as sex was concerned (although not necessarily so far as violence was concerned), and the levels of eroticism seen in "Body Heat" became the exception rather than the rule in the mainstream cinema. (There were a number of so-called "erotic thrillers" in the early nineties, most of which seemed to star either Tanya Roberts or Shannon Tweed, but these were films which concentrated much more upon erotica than they did on thrills, little more than softcore porn with a plot). The result is that "Body Heat" today seems as much of a period piece as "Double Indemnity" or "The Big Sleep". It remains, nevertheless, an effective piece of cinema. 7/10