Body Heat (1981)

Surprisingly entertaining early eighties thriller that has more plot twists than an episode of Murder, She Wrote which at times I thought I was watching. It has that made for television feel. Maybe it is because the film is nearly forty years old? It has a stellar cast including William Hurt (not the late John Hurt) as lawyer Ned Racine, Kathleen Turner (Matty Walker - apparently!) in her film debut and Ted Danson with a pre-Three Men and a Baby hairstyle. The plot is very reminiscent of film noir genre. Matty is a female vamp who entraps Ned in a murder/inheritance case with copious amounts of naked shenanigans to make up the screenplay! As well as the copulation a Florida heatwave is behind the film's title. On reading the production team credits I noticed that the music was scored by legendary James Bond composer John Barry. I noticed some strings from the Moonraker score in there. At the time of the film's release in 1981 it was some thirty or forty years since the height of film noir releases. The sex scenes are tame in today's social media driven society but I can imagine they were considered quite 'steamy' at the time. Turner who I have only feint eighties recollections in Romancing The Stone makes a splendid screen debut. A film that is worthy of its quite high ratings.

a world where certain modernities have gotten stuck in time.Written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, this film stars William Hurt as Ned Racine, a mediocre attorney in a small southern town who is more famous for one particular legal screw-up - one that figures prominently into the plot - than his small time victories. He gets passionately involved with Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner), beautiful classy wife of rather absentee (always off on business) and somewhat shady businessman Edmund Walker (Richard Crenna) who has implied mob ties. The thing is, what to do about it? They could just run away together, but Matty signed a pre-nup and gets nothing in any divorce, plus she does not want to be poor. This pushes Ned toward a more final solution, a solution that might be made easier considering Walker's mob ties as a smokescreen for any vanishing act Edmund might appear to make.Ned is friends with the local sheriff, Oscar Grace (J.A. Preston) with Ted Danson thrown in before he was the world's most famous Boston bartender in "Cheers". Grace is the voice of the law, Danson's character is the voice of pragmatism.This is an anachronistic southern noir that is supposedly taking place in the time the movie was made - 1981 - but doesn't realize thirty years have passed. All of that sweating, the premium placed on a night breeze, all of that ice on sexy necks and down blouses. 90% of the sex appeal - and atmosphere - would disappear if somebody would just turn on the A.C! Mickey Rourke plays a firebug and one of Ned's clients who - without being told EXACTLY what his attorney is up to, throws Ned's advice back at him - "Any time you try a decent crime you got 50 ways you can mess up. You think of 25 of them and you're a genius. And you ain't no genius". Rourke's character says this because he genuinely likes Ned. Gosh Rourke was a handsome guy just dipped in masculine mojo back in the day.Matty's past is quite mysterious. She talks about being heavy into drugs when she was young and how a lawyer helped her get clean and gave her a job in his office. And then she met Edmund Walker. Too bad the internet and google didn't exist in 1981, because it could have saved old Ned some tragedy. The lack of google is more tragic than the existence of air conditioning that goes unused.The jazzy/bluesy score is by John Barry, the stylistic cinematography by Richard H. Kline (The Boston Strangler (1968)) . I highly recommend this timeless noir.

As neo-noirs go, "Body Heat" stands right up there with the greats. And despite its ultra-sweaty setting, it still manages to maintain an ultra- cool style. All of the pieces in this puzzle fit just so perfectly. William Hurt plays a great patsy, completely in over his head; Kathleen Turner is pitch perfect as the femme fatale (she's got that "bad news" written all over her . . . and that voice!). And between that sweet '80s sax score (like a soap opera "Chinatown") and the incredible tone and setting Lawrence Kasdan kicks off from the get-go, you can just feel the steam coming off of the screen. The plot is twisty enough, but that yearbook scene at the end was one helluva capper. Great movie. 8/10

Now, I have to admit something. I do enjoy watching movies that consists on film-noir style. I really do. Like anyone else, I do have my own favorite batch of genres that I like to watch on my own. My favorite genres are action, crime/gangster, science-fiction and western. But, film-noir or neo-noir pictures are essentially one of my personal and favorite one of all. Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote both Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back, written and directed a movie of his own. The name of it? Body Heat. The movie takes place in Florida during an endless, steamy heat wave. Ned Racine (William Hurt), is a seedy lawyer, who can't seem to get his hands off of his female clients. He's the kind of guy that someone would call a sleazeball, yet you know, Ned is a sleazy man, who can't seem to stop doing what he does best. One night, he runs across an beautiful brunette, Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner, in her first movie role) during a outdoor concert. At first, Walker doesn't buy Ned's womanizing tactics and even after her refusal, Ned continues to see her, even though her husband is away. Soon enough, Ned and Matty began to start a steamy and somewhat erotic affair between the both of them. Then, Matty tells Ned that she is planning to kill her rich husband so that she can collect all of the money. Walker's husband, Edmund, (Richard Crenna) soon comes home and doesn't seem to notice the ongoing relationship between Matty and Ned. But, the movie does get interesting when Ned finds himself getting in way over his head about falling in love with Matty. The plot leads to a series of corruption, betrayal and even suspicion when a private investigator suspects that someone kills Edmund. The surprising interest that ignites this movie is the relationship between Ned and Matty, between William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. Their sex scenes are truly well-shot and also very erotic in its own right. Another criticism that I have about the movie is Kathleen Turner. She definitely stole the movie away from all of the other supporting actors. During the whole time when I was watching Body Heat, I was reminded of other femme-fatales that were erected straight out from other 1940's film-noir classics like Double Indemnity, The Asphalt Jungle and Out of the Past. Turner does resembled a lot like a modern femme-fatale of the 80's. The one thing that all femme-fatales have in common that I certainly did see in Kathleen Turner is the lips. Her lips have a red-hot flare to them. Every time a light shimmers over her lips, I was reminded of those 1940's femme-fatales. In fact, Double Indemnity and Out of the Past, the two movies that I mentioned above, were the two movies that were inspired to make Body Heat. But, getting back on Kathleen Turner's performance. She's beautiful to look at and she is also smart in the way that her character can easily manipulate Ned by convincing him to go along with her murder plot. As for the eroticism of this movie, I have to say that it really is convincing and it is sexy. One of the high points in this movie is when Ned looks through the window at Matty and he can't control his lust about her. So, he takes a chair and throws it through the glass window and walks up to her and start kissing her. That is just about as sexy as a movie can go. If you think about it, it isn't played for dirtiness. It isn't trash. It's a neo-noir picture of the 80's. For its time, Body Heat was shocking when it first came out and even today, it is ranked as being one of the best erotic thrillers ever made. In fact, I think that Body Heat helped inspired other neo-noir films of its kind like Blood Simple or The Last Seduction, which was film-noir for the 90's. Furthermore, Kasdan himself feared that he would never make another picture in his career. Lucky for him, his career did expanded with other pictures like The Big Chill and the western Sliverado. His screenplay crackles with high-voltage energy and with star-making performances by Turner and Hurt. Hurt himself is also very convincing as the seedy lawyer who doesn't know what he is getting himself into. Kasdan's direction is also great. He knows how a scene works by letting the characters and the actors talk and communicate through dialogue that literally breaks through like glass. Body Heat proves to be, once again one of the best erotic thrillers ever made. It is well-paced, well-directed with excellent performances by Hurt and Turner and it is one of the films of 1981. Suspenseful and sexy. ★★★★ 4 stars.