La fièvre au corps

A modern remake of the 1940s film, "Double Indemnity," this movie has a solid, large fan base of its own. That's justifiable, too, because this is well done.

It sports a 1940s-type film noir soundtrack but the rest is purely 1980s. By that, I mainly mean nudity and profanity, although the language isn't that offensive.

Kathleen Turner plays a femme fatale, similar to Barbara Stanwyck's role with Fred MacMurray in "Double Indemnity," except with a different ending. Actually, the entire story is quite different from the classic film noir. William Hurt has MacMurray's male lead role. I liked the classic actors better but Turner and Hurt shine with their performances, too.

This is steamy movie to say the least. Set on hot, humid Florida summer nights, you can almost feel the heat coming out from the TV screen and the heat from the two leads going at it several times. Turner is excellent as a woman who will go to great lengths for money, as they sometimes do. (Hey, my 87-year-old father is dating a 24-year bimbo in Florida, so I know of where I speak.)

The story is divided into three segments: (1) the setup; (2) the romance and plotting of the crime and (3) the crime and unraveling of Hurt as things begin to go very wrong.

An intriguing film, this loses nothing with multiple viewings. It's always interesting. The more I watched this, the more I found - as the case frequently is - myself fascinated with some of the lesser characters such as Hurt's two friends, played by Ted Danson and J.A. Preston. Danson, by the way, gives us a preview of the amoral character he played later in the hit TV series, "Cheers."

This is the kind of film you snuggle up with someone on a cold winter night. It will warm you up as much as your partner!

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

I remember watching the John Garfield and Lana Turner film noir classic `The Postman Always Rings Twice' with my mother when I was little. After the couple murdered Turner's husband, mom turned to me and said, `Watch. The two killers will be punished in the end.' `Why?' I asked. `It's the movie code,' she explained: Evil-doers must be punished."

While I'm not a fan of the sex and language direction that films have taken since the movie code died, part of the fun in watching `Body Heat' is knowing that there is a chance that either or both William Hurt and Kathleen Turner will get by with killing Turner's husband, played by Richard Crenna.

`Body Heat' is almost as good as `Double Indemnity,' which is considered by many to be best of the man-teams-with-woman-to-kill-her-husband genre. In `Indemnity' part of the fun is watching the Fred MacMurray character trying to outsmart his friend and mentor, played by Edward G. Robinson. In "Heat" Hurt has two friends he must deceive, cop J.A. Preston and a pre-`Cheers' assistant prosecutor Ted Danson. Try to figure out at what point they know Hurt is guilty.

The performances in `Body Heat' are excellent. In addition to Hurt, Turner, Crenna, Danson and Preston, this was Mickey Roarke's break-through role. Lawrence Kasden, who doesn't waste a shot, expertly directs the film. A great musical score by John Barry of James Bond composing fame expertly aids the steamy mood.

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.

I stumbled across 'Body Heat' recently during a late night channel surf, and I would have to say that I was also pleasantly surprised at the high quality of this movie.

Though the acting and direction are top notch, I felt the music really pushed the movie over the top. The hauntingly melancholic string work serves not only as ambiance, but also acts as narrative. The sweet yet cautionary score mirrors the plot theme of 'moth to the flame'- obvious danger yet unavoidably seductive beauty. To this day, it sends chills down my spine!

p.s. Ted Danson's 'happy go lucky, dancing fool' role is sublime. Reminds me of his 'Creepshow' role around this same time period, which is also great.