BODY HEAT Directed and Written by Lawrence Kasdan
It is 1946; it is 1981. Overhead fans languidly attempt to rearrange the air. Late afternoon heat seeps through the Venetian blinds. A tenor sax investigates the upper registers of despair. Ned Racine (William Hurt) drags voraciously on a nonstop series of cigarettes. He wears a Clark Gable mustache and a Zachary Scott hat. And one night, as a Dorsey-style orchestra plays That Old Feeling, a sleek, tanned woman in white emerges from the darkness of the band shell and into the rest of Ned's life.
Body Heat—wonderful title—bears a family resemblance in plot and tone to James M. Cain's Double Indemnity: a man more ordinary than he thinks he is meets a newly rich femme fatale; sparks fly, plots hatch, a husband dies, insurance claims are debated, friendships fray, the lovers quarrel and part explosively. And though Lawrence Kasdan's film is set in today's South Florida, its characters move through an atmosphere that suggests the confluences of decor and demeanor in a 1940s film noir.
"You're not too smart," Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) tells Ned at their first meeting. "I like that in a man." She does indeed; Matty is too smart for both of them. A detective friend of Ned's describes her as "one quick, smart broad" whose special gift is relentlessness. At the outset, Matty is trapped in comfortable domesticity, married to a wealthy land speculator (Richard Crenna) 20 years older than she. But her ambition is "to be rich and live in an exotic land." The insurance money that would be hers with her husband's death represents air fare to that dream world. And Ned—lousy lawyer, good pal, nice-guy stud—may prove to be her passport.
As the only female principal in a cast of shysters, cops and crooks—and as the agent of their anxiety—Matty might seem one more example of moviemaker misogyny hiding behind the imperatives of the thriller genre. She surely is a metaphor for the seductive, destructive power of ambition. But she is also the one figure of reckless imagination. Smoothly and confidently, she guides the taut mechanism of the movie's plot. She creates between herself and Ned a sexual attraction that erases the past and suggests terrible new options. And she knows, as a young woman whose Midwestern memories are as sordid as her Palm Beach present is posh, that she must sweat for what she wants. The film and the other characters sweat with her. Perspiration stains the satin sheets as Ned and Matty make love; and after, there is dew on the down of her back as she caresses and coaxes him. She is the mistress of these ceremonies, leading Ned on by his lust toward acts of love and murder.