Body Heat (1981)

Body Heat, released in 1981, is one of the great neo-noirs.

This was Lawrence Kasdan’s first film as director and it’s a stunning debut. He also wrote the script. He was a huge fan of classic film noir. Body Heat is an homage to the great films noirs of the 40s but it’s also one of the defining neo-noirs. It’s more than just a recycling of 1940s film noir tropes.

Ned Racine is a two-bit lawyer in a two-bit town in Florida. He’s a lousy lawyer but he has considerable success with women. If he put half as much effort into his job as a lawyer as he puts into chasing skirt he’d be a great lawyer. He’s a loser but he doesn’t yet know how much of a loser he is.

Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) attracts his attention immediately. She is beautiful and she has class. He wants her. His pursuit of her is clumsy. As a ladies’ man Ned has no style but he does have determination. He just doesn’t get the message when she gives him the brush-off. He has to have her.

They have sweaty steamy sex. Soon she’s as obsessed by him as he is with her.

Matty is married. She tells Ned how important it is for them to be discreet. Her husband Edmund (Richard Crenna) is rich, powerful and mean. But they’re not discreet.

They both know that there is only one obstacle to their happiness - Edmund. If Edmund had some sort of accident, of the fatal kind, they could be together. And they’d be rich. Very rich.

It’s a classic film noir setup but there are some subtle differences. This is not just a rehash of Double Indemnity. Matty is a femme fatale but Ned is the active driver of events. He seduces her. He’s the one who suggests murder.

Ned has a plan. It’s ingenious but there’s a fair amount of adolescent wish-fulfilment fantasy in all of Ned’s scheming.

Very early on we get one of the greatest lines in film noir industry. Matty says to Ned, “You’re not too smart are you? I like that in a man.” It’s not just a great line, it’s important. Ned really isn’t too smart. That’s why he’s a cheap lawyer in a cheap town. Had he been smart he’d have been a big-time lawyer in Miami.

And there are genuinely unexpected twists to come. There are no perfect crimes. The cleverer the murder the more things there are that can go wrong.

William Hurt was not yet a star. Kasdan didn’t want established stars for the lead roles. This is the movie that really put Hurt on the map as an actor.

This was Kathleen Turner’s film debut and what a debut. She sizzles.

Everything about the Ned-Matty relationship is steamy, sweaty, sleazy and desperate. And cheap and tawdry.

The biggest single difference between the classic film noir of the 1940s and 1950s and neo-noir is the visual style. One of the most important defining characteristics of classic film noir is the visual style and that visual style only worked and could only work in black-and-white. There are things you could only do in black-and-white and film noir is one of them. It’s all about the shadows.

Neo-noir starts with John Boorman’s Point Blank in 1967. It hit its stride in the mid-70s. By 1967 black-and-white was no longer a commercial option. A way had to be found to create a new noir aesthetic that would work in colour.

With Chinatown Polanski and his director of photography John A. Alonzo found one solution. Rather than having dark, moody, shadowy black-and-white cinematography that complemented the dark, moody doom-laden subject matter they would go for lots of colour and bathe everything in bright California sunshine as an ironic counterpoint to the dark, moody doom-laden subject matter. It worked brilliantly. It became one of the standard neo-noir techniques. You can see it in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct almost two decades later.

In Body Heat writer-director Lawrence Kasdan and his D.P. Richard H. Kline found a different solution. Kasdan came up with a masterstroke - setting his movie in Florida. Not the glamorous tourist Florida but a grimy little town in the middle of a heat wave. The kind of fairly unprosperous town in which air conditioning was not yet ubiquitous. Nobody in Kasdan’s small Florida town has an air conditioner. The heat is stifling and oppressive. Everybody is bathed in sweat. The whole town reeks of sweat.

There’s heat but we don’t see much glorious sunshine. Everything seems like it’s seen through a misty heat haze. There’s nothing healthy about it. It has the atmosphere of a foetid swamp.

There’s plenty of eroticism in classic film noir but it all had to be achieved by suggestion. In neo-noir it’s right out there in plain view. The sex in Body Heat isn’t the slightest bit explicit but it’s very sleazy.

Body Heat is superb stuff. Very highly recommended.

Body Heat looks great on Blu-Ray and the disc includes something rare these days - genuinely worthwhile extras.