![]() ![]() Take away fun, and it's not film noir anymore, it's just a dour drama about losers betting everything on one final roll of the dice. It's no fun, and the absence of fun is fatal to noir. Maybe the problem was that by setting it in-period, yet filling it with blunt sex and '70s-style sleazoid characters, Rafelson created another kind of cognitive dissonance, one that (unlike "Body Heat") read as art-house pretension and self-seriousness. A marriage of true heels.īy coincidence, writer-director Bob Rafelson developed his version of "Postman," starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, around the same time, but it was released five months after "Body Heat" and had no impact. You get the sense that he's already imagined all the ways he could be tripped up and decided to forge ahead anyhow. If you think Ned accurately estimates his abilities, well, you've never seen " Double Indemnity," or either version of " The Postman Always Rings Twice," the closest analogues for "Body Heat." Like the heroes of those stories, Ned believes in love even though he acts like he doesn't. He's smart in the way that many audience members are smart (or think that they're smart). He's the first noir patsy who might've been to therapy. Ned could have been a contemporary screenwriter who resettled in Florida after a failed attempt at a Hollywood career, wandered into Matty's orbit, and thought, "I've seen this movie before." It's Hurt's peculiar energy, smug yet aware of its smugness, that gives "Body Heat" its unique tension. His slowed-down eloquence and self-satisfied vibe are more color than black-and-white. The only casting link to the then-present moment is Hurt, and its Hurt who holds the film together and makes Kasdan's old-but-new gambit work. Turner is the perfect actress for Matty-so perfect that she'd essentially reprise the character's voice seven years later for Robert Zemeckis' half-animated noir spoof " Who Framed Roger Rabbit"-and everyone else is spot-on as well, so much so that you could almost imagine them rising fully-formed from the imagination of a pulp writer old enough to have been Kasdan's grandfather. Hurt’s nascent stardom (which kicked off the preceding summer with " Altered States") was cemented by this movie, which also elevated Turner (in her first leading role), Ted Danson (as Ned’s nerdy, chatterbox best friend, just a year away from starring in TV's "Cheers"), and a smoldering young whisperer named Mickey Rourke, who has just two scenes as an arsonist but tucks the film into his back pocket like a stolen pack of cigarettes. 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.Written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, a wunderkind fresh off co-writing " The Empire Strikes Back" for George Lucas, and shot and cut by the husband-wife team of cinematographer John Bailey and editor Carol Littleton, "Body Heat" is a self-aware continuation of a grand tradition that brings 1940s tropes into the ’80s, pushing hard-boiled attitude to the brink of parody. 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. An intriguing film, this loses nothing with multiple viewings. ![]() (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. Turner is excellent as a woman who will go to great lengths for money, as they sometimes do. 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. I liked the classic actors better but Turner and Hurt shine with their performances, too. William Hurt has MacMurray's male lead role. Actually, the entire story is quite different from the classic film noir. Kathleen Turner plays a femme fatale, similar to Barbara Stanwyck's role with Fred MacMurray in "Double Indemnity," except with a different ending. By that, I mainly mean nudity and profanity, although the language isn't that offensive. It sports a 1940s-type film noir soundtrack but the rest is purely 1980s. ![]() That's justifiable, too, because this is well done. A modern remake of the 1940s film, "Double Indemnity," this movie has a solid, large fan base of its own. ![]()
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