Body Heat is a rarity in film. It's both a loving and faithful homage and an outstanding story in its own right.
The movie is the story of Ned Racine (William Hurt), a small-time lawyer in a Florida small town who's coasting through life providing mediocre representation to his bottom-of-the-barrel clients. Ned's the sort of guy who'll bed any available woman but lights up a cigarette after he's finished jogging. Then, one night down on the beach front, Ned notices the stunning and sultry Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) and runs after her like a starving dog chasing a cat covered in steak sauce. They fall in lust and after some tremendous nude scenes, decide that the best thing for them is to do away with Matty's older, wealthy and legally shady husband Edmund (Richard Crenna). But like most "boy-meets-girl, boy-kills-girl's husband" stories, things don't work out all that well for the boy in the end.
Body Heat is clearly Lawrence Kasdan's attempt at making a modern (for the 1980s) film noir. But he's not trying to reimagine or reinterpret the genre. He's not trying to put some new twist on the classic noir story or use it as a forum for postmodern meta-commentary on something or other. You could call it formulaic, but that's only a bad thing if you don't happen to like the original formula.
What Kasdan does do is take noir and successfully bring it from the black-and-white era of its origins into the less restricted movie world of the 1980s. Body Heat has all the elements and tone of the classic noirs, but doesn't have the same limitations on what it can say or show on screen. Ned and Matty's first meetings at the beach and in a bar are dominated by the same clever, back-and-forth, sexually charged banter, but it's slower and more realistic than the contrived, rat-a-tat-tat verbal jousting of classic noir. And the language they use, while smart and funny, is cruder and more raw than the Sunday School vocabulary all movies used to be hemmed in by. The sex that had to simmer and seethe beneath the surface in the 1940s is boldly splashed and sloshed all through Body Heat.
William Hurt gives a great performance as a somewhat charming loser who finds himself drawing on reserves of strength and smarts he's never been motivated enough to use. And while Kathleen Turner's role as the femme fatale is a bit more limited, as those roles tend to be, she makes the audience seen what Ned sees in Matty – a tough and beautiful front covering up the weak and desperate for love woman inside. Ned sees Matty as his chance, not to be a hero, but to be the main character and not a bit player in the story of his life. Ted Danson also does a nice job as Ned's friend Lowenstein, the assistant county attorney who figures out what Ned and Matty have done but doesn't really care.
Though it debuted in 1981, Body Heat only looks and feels marginally dated. Camera work has gotten a bit more sophisticated since the early 80s and there are a couple of times when it looks more like a TV movie than a big screen experience and it was made in the era before everything in a film had to be hyper-pretty or hyper ugly. William Hurt doesn't have a phenomenal physique and the characters all wear the sort of clothes normal people would wear, not the overly stylized outfits of today's films that either look a lot better or a lot worse than what people really wear. And Kasdan manages to weave a lot of clever foreshadowing through the story, where a scene becomes more meaningful as you recall it later in the film.
About the only real weakness of Body Heat is that to get the ending they wanted, Ned has to give a little speech and made a bunch of rather extreme assumptions in order to set it up. But if you can only make a minor complaint about the last 3 minutes of a movie, you've just watched something really good.
The movie is the story of Ned Racine (William Hurt), a small-time lawyer in a Florida small town who's coasting through life providing mediocre representation to his bottom-of-the-barrel clients. Ned's the sort of guy who'll bed any available woman but lights up a cigarette after he's finished jogging. Then, one night down on the beach front, Ned notices the stunning and sultry Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) and runs after her like a starving dog chasing a cat covered in steak sauce. They fall in lust and after some tremendous nude scenes, decide that the best thing for them is to do away with Matty's older, wealthy and legally shady husband Edmund (Richard Crenna). But like most "boy-meets-girl, boy-kills-girl's husband" stories, things don't work out all that well for the boy in the end.
Body Heat is clearly Lawrence Kasdan's attempt at making a modern (for the 1980s) film noir. But he's not trying to reimagine or reinterpret the genre. He's not trying to put some new twist on the classic noir story or use it as a forum for postmodern meta-commentary on something or other. You could call it formulaic, but that's only a bad thing if you don't happen to like the original formula.
What Kasdan does do is take noir and successfully bring it from the black-and-white era of its origins into the less restricted movie world of the 1980s. Body Heat has all the elements and tone of the classic noirs, but doesn't have the same limitations on what it can say or show on screen. Ned and Matty's first meetings at the beach and in a bar are dominated by the same clever, back-and-forth, sexually charged banter, but it's slower and more realistic than the contrived, rat-a-tat-tat verbal jousting of classic noir. And the language they use, while smart and funny, is cruder and more raw than the Sunday School vocabulary all movies used to be hemmed in by. The sex that had to simmer and seethe beneath the surface in the 1940s is boldly splashed and sloshed all through Body Heat.
William Hurt gives a great performance as a somewhat charming loser who finds himself drawing on reserves of strength and smarts he's never been motivated enough to use. And while Kathleen Turner's role as the femme fatale is a bit more limited, as those roles tend to be, she makes the audience seen what Ned sees in Matty – a tough and beautiful front covering up the weak and desperate for love woman inside. Ned sees Matty as his chance, not to be a hero, but to be the main character and not a bit player in the story of his life. Ted Danson also does a nice job as Ned's friend Lowenstein, the assistant county attorney who figures out what Ned and Matty have done but doesn't really care.
Though it debuted in 1981, Body Heat only looks and feels marginally dated. Camera work has gotten a bit more sophisticated since the early 80s and there are a couple of times when it looks more like a TV movie than a big screen experience and it was made in the era before everything in a film had to be hyper-pretty or hyper ugly. William Hurt doesn't have a phenomenal physique and the characters all wear the sort of clothes normal people would wear, not the overly stylized outfits of today's films that either look a lot better or a lot worse than what people really wear. And Kasdan manages to weave a lot of clever foreshadowing through the story, where a scene becomes more meaningful as you recall it later in the film.
About the only real weakness of Body Heat is that to get the ending they wanted, Ned has to give a little speech and made a bunch of rather extreme assumptions in order to set it up. But if you can only make a minor complaint about the last 3 minutes of a movie, you've just watched something really good.