Body Heat – New Movie Review

Like a tantalizing mirage, film noir haunts modern filmmakers.
Noir is the genre of night, guilt, violence and illicit passion, and no genre
is more seductive. But the best noirs were made in the 1940s and 1950s, before
directors consciously knew what they were doing (“We called them B movies,”
said Robert Mitchum).

Once the French named the genre, once a generation of filmmakers
came along who had seen noirs at cinematheques instead of in flea pits, noir
could never again be naive. One of the joys of a great noir like “Detour”
(1954) is the feeling that it was made by people who took the story perfectly
seriously. One of the dangers of modern self-conscious noir, as Pauline Kael
wrote in her scathing dismissal of “Body Heat,” is that an actress like
Kathleen Turner comes across “as if she were following the marks on the floor
made by the actresses who preceded her.”

And
yet if bad modern noir can play like a parody, good noir still has the power to
seduce. Yes, Lawrence Kasdan’s “Body Heat” (1981) is aware of the films that
inspired it–especially Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” (1944). But it has a
power that transcends its sources. It exploits the personal style of its stars
to insinuate itself; Kael is unfair to Turner, who in her debut role played a
woman so sexually confident that we can believe her lover (William Hurt) could
be dazed into doing almost anything for her. The moment we believe that, the
movie stops being an exercise and starts working. (I think the moment occurs in
the scene where she leads Hurt by her hand in that manner a man is least
inclined to argue with.)

Women
are rarely allowed to be bold and devious in the movies; most directors are
men, and they see women as goals, prizes, enemies, lovers and friends, but
rarely as protagonists. Turner’s entrance in “Body Heat” announces that she is
the film’s center of power. It is a hot, humid night in Florida. Hurt, playing
a cocky but lazy lawyer named Ned Racine, is strolling on a pier where an
exhausted band is listlessly playing. He is behind the seated audience. We can
see straight down the center aisle to the bandstand. All is dark and red and
orange. Suddenly a woman in white stands up, turns around and walks straight
toward him. This is Matty Walker. To see her is to need her.

Turner
in her first movie role was an intriguing original. Slender, with hair down to
her shoulders, she evoked aspects of Barbara Stanwyck and Lauren Bacall. But
the voice, with its elusive hint of a Latin accent, was challenging. She had “angry
eyes,” the critic David Thomson observed. And a slight overbite (later
corrected, I think) gave a playful edge to her challenging dialogue (“You’re
not too smart, are you?” she says soon after meeting him. “I like that in a
man.”)

Hurt
had been in one movie before “Body Heat” (Ken Russell’s “Altered States” in
1980). He was still unfamiliar: a tall, already balding, indolently handsome
man with a certain lazy arrogance to his speech, as if amused by his own
intelligence. “Body Heat” is a movie about a woman who gets a man to commit
murder for her. It is important that the man not be a dummy; he needs to be
smart enough to think of the plan himself. One of the brilliant touches of
Kasdan’s screenplay is the way he makes Ned Racine think he is the initiator of
Matty Walker’s plans.

Few
movies have done a better job of evoking the weather. Heat, body heat, is a
convention of pornography, where performers routinely complain about how warm
they are (as if lovemaking could cool them off, instead of making them hotter).
Although air conditioning was not unknown in South Florida in 1981, the
characters here are constantly in heat; there is a scene where Ned comes home,
takes off his shirt and stands in front of the open refrigerator. The film
opens with an inn burning in the distance (“Somebody’s torched it to clear the
lot,” Ned says. “Probably one of my clients.”) There are other fires. There is
the use of the color red. There is the sense that heat inflames passion and
encourages madness.

In
this heat, Matty seems cool. Early in the film there is a justly famous scene
where Matty brings Ned home from a bar, allegedly to listen to her wind chimes,
and then asks him to leave. He leaves, then returns, and looks through a window
next to her front door. She stands inside, dressed in red, calmly returning his
gaze. He picks up a chair and throws it through the window, and in the next
shot they are embracing. Knowing what we know about Matty, look once again at
her expression as she looks back at him. She looks as confident and absorbed as
a child who has pushed a button and is waiting for a video game to respond.

Kasdan,
born in 1949, worked in ad agencies before moving to Hollywood to write
screenplays. His more personal work languished in desk drawers while his first
credits were two of the biggest blockbusters of all time, “The Empire Strikes
Back” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” George Lucas acted as executive producer
on this directorial debut to reassure Warner Bros. that it would come in on
time and be releasable. It was; David Chute wrote in Film Comment that it was “perhaps
the most stunning debut movie ever” (which raises the question of “Citizen
Kane,” but never mind). Kasdan’s subsequent career has alternated between
action pieces written for others (“Return of the Jedi,” aspects of “The
Bodyguard”) and quirky, smart films directed by himself (“The Accidental
Tourist,” “I Love You To Death,” and the brilliant, overlooked “Grand Canyon”
in 1991).

In
“Body Heat,” Kasdan’s original screenplay surrounds the characters with good,
well-written performances in supporting roles; he creates a real world of
police stations, diners, law offices and restaurants, away from which Matty has
seduced Ned into her own twisted scenario. The best supporting work in the
movie is by Mickey Rourke, in his breakthrough role, as Ned’s friend, a
professional arsonist. Richard Crenna is Matty’s husband. “He’s small, and
mean, and weak,” she tells Ned, but when we see him he is not small or weak.
Ted Danson and J.A. Preston are a D.A. and a cop, Ned’s friends, who are drawn
reluctantly into suspecting him of murder (Danson’s sense of timing and nuance
are perfect in a night scene where he essentially briefs his friend Ned on the
case against him).

“Kasdan
has modern characters talking jive talk as if they’d been boning up on Chandler
novels,” Kael wrote, “and he doesn’t seem to know if he wants laughs or not.”
But isn’t it almost essential for noir characters to talk in a certain
heightened style, and isn’t it possible for us to smile in recognition? On the
night they first make love, Ned tells Matty, “Maybe you shouldn’t dress like
that.” She says, “This is a blouse and skirt. I don’t know what you’re talking
about.” And he says, “You shouldn’t wear that body.” Chandleresque? Yes. Works
in this movie? Yes.

And
there is some dialogue that unblinkingly confronts the enormity of the crime
that Ned and Matty are contemplating. In many movies, the killers use
self-justification and rationalization to talk themselves into murder. There is
a chilling scene in “Body Heat” where Ned flatly tells Matty: “That man is
gonna die for no reason but . . . we want him to.”

The
plot and its double-crosses are of course part of the pleasure, although
watching the film again last night, aware of its secrets, I found the final
payoff less rewarding than the diabolical setup. The closing scenes are
obligatory (and the final beach scene is perfunctory and unconvincing). The
last scene that works as drama is the one where Ned suggests to Matty that she
go get the glasses in the boathouse, and then she pauses on the lawn to tell
him, “Ned, whatever you think–I really do love you.”

Does
she? That’s what makes the movie so intriguing. Does he love her, for that
matter? Or is he swept away by sexual intoxication–body heat? You watch the
movie the first time from his point of view, and the second time from hers.
Every scene plays two ways. “Body Heat” is good enough to make film noir play
like we hadn’t seen it before.