![]() ![]() "Body Heat," in comparison, is-for all its slinky, cinephile-footnoted knowingness-a disturbing experience. " Safe," in the United States, means PG-13 rated or below, no sex, no drugs or excessive drinking, no morally questionable behavior that isn't immediately identified as such and loudly condemned, no graphic violence and yet (strangely predictably) a high body count, committed mainly against anonymous henchpersons, dispatched quickly and without agony or bloodshed. It's what makes it funny and self-deprecating as well as self-infatuated and overripe.Īnd, to invoke what has become a cliche (because it's true!), it's what stamps "Body Heat" the sort of film that would never get made today-at least not in the United States, where (as of this writing) there's not much call for anything but so-called "four quadrant blockbusters" that are safe to take the kids to. But that particular brand of overkill/redundancy is a big part of what makes the film feel simultaneously knowing and naive, classic and modern. When "Body Heat" was released, in the same summer as " Raiders of the Lost Ark," " Superman II," and other big-budget films with a retro feeling, more than one critic noted that it didn’t make a lot of sense for the film’s lead characters to speak in the kind of erotically charged innuendo that was once written to get around studio censorship, then show them taking their clothes off and having sweaty, lurid sex. 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. 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. ![]()
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