1981

Body Heat

DIR. LAWRENCE KASDAN

© WARNER BROS./EVERETT

The simultaneously sinister and sultry seduction typical of noir is revisited and eroticized in Lawrence Kasdan’s breakthrough neo noir, with William Hurt and a then-unknown Kathleen Turner.

In 1944’s classic noir Double Indemnity, writer-director Billy Wilder outmaneuvered the Hollywood censors through clever elusiveness and sly suggestion: The film worked in part because of what wasn’t said or shown. Some four decades later, writer-director Lawrence Kasdan’s update, Body Heat, brilliantly revels in things that Wilder could only hint at . . . chief among them, of course, sex.

The prototype for a series of erotic thrillers that followed its success, Body Heat revolves around an adulterous affair between lawyer Ned Racine (William Hurt) and Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner). Not surprisingly, they conspire to kill her husband, with plenty of twists and turns (and did we mention sex?) along the way—and with dialogue straight out of classic noir. “You’re not too smart, are you?” Matty says. “I like that in a man.”

This kind of language was part of what inspired Kasdan. Though he was a successful screenwriter hot off The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark, he had never directed a film. “I was worried that I would never get another chance, so I wanted to try as many things as I could,” he tells LIFE. “Noir gives you enormous license with the camera, license for stylized dialogue. I wanted to do a movie that wasn’t naturalistic and to have a lot of fun with it.”

Even though the film has been widely called an unofficial remake of Double Indemnity, Kasdan says that 1947’s Out of the Past was possibly an even greater influence. “It has a very high level of wit and worldliness to it,” he says of Out of the Past. “It’s funny and sly and wry and twisted and wonderful.”

Though a noir in color seems a contradiction in terms, Body Heat successfully translates the chiaroscuro of its predecessors by accentuating the intense orange glow of the sultry Florida weather. There’s plenty of sweaty skin glistening in the southern sun on display, though the film was shot during one of the coldest Florida summers on record. “Few movies have done a better job of evoking the weather,” critic Roger Ebert wrote.

Kasdan’s follow-up, The Big Chill, which also stars Hurt, would seem leagues away from his debut, but the director sees the films as intimately connected. “Ned Racine wants to hit it big without doing the work, without doing what’s necessary—something I felt was rife among my contemporaries,” he says, “and that’s so much of what informs The Big Chill. So Body Heat was very much about that for me: What happens when a guy who has personal charm and has done well with women but isn’t effective in the world runs into someone who’s effective in the world?”

LADD COMPANY/WARNER BROS./KOBAL/ART RESOURCE, NY

Turner in histrionic mode.