It feels like Criterion is skimping on the extras a little nowadays, focusing more on the picture quality and restorations than the supporting materials, which is a little galling considering how much the price of these has risen. A lot of the special features included here were available on the Premium Collection release – these include deleted scenes, featurettes on the making of, and archive interviews with Hurt and Turner. The new features include an in-depth interview with Kasdan, and a conversation with the film’s editor Carol Littleton and film historian Bobbie O Steen. It all comes down to how much you value an upscaled picture versus the cost of the upgrade.
★★★★★
Out on 4K UHD on June 1st/ William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Ted Danson, JA Preston, Mickey Rourke, Richard Crenna / Dir: Lawrence Kasdan / The Criterion Collection, Warner Bros / 18
With the country currently in the grip of an extreme heatwave, Criterion’s UK release of Body Heat could not be more timely. It’s a film where the oppressive Florida humidity suffuses every frame, with characters drenched in sweat, constantly commenting on the unbearable temperature, with the heat itself ultimately becoming a manifestation of the desire that clouds the judgement and weakens the resolve of our doomed protagonist, making him susceptible to manipulation.
Watching the film today, the phrase that kept recurring in my mind was that term coined by critic Raquel S. Benedict about modern Hollywood: “Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.” Contemporary cinema often feels oddly puritanical about sex, despite its obsession with physical perfection, which perhaps explains why the erotic thriller has all but disappeared from mainstream cinema. There’s the odd outlier, like Challengers or Babygirl, but these are pretty far away from the mainstream. The genre itself is often associated with lurid, trashy thrillers – you never expect them to actually be good! Yet films like The Big Easy, Jagged Edge and especially Body Heat show just how rich and sophisticated the form could be.
Self-consciously styled after the hard-boiled, often explicit stories of James M Cain, and released the same year as the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Body Heat openly positions itself as a modern reworking of classic film noir, particularly Double Indemnity. William Hurt plays Ned Racine, a slightly sleazy small-town Florida lawyer whose chance encounter with the married Mattie Walker (Kathleen Turner) draws him into an increasingly dangerous murder plot. The hard-boiled dialogue is so aggressively noir-inflected it occasionally borders on parody, yet Kasdan and his cast play everything absolutely straight. The result is a film that feels both affectionate toward noir conventions and entirely sincere in its sensuality and cynicism.
Lawrence Kasdan’s directorial debut is one of the most unabashedly horny films ever made, but crucially, the eroticism is inseparable from the storytelling. There is a lot of sex in the first half of the film, and a lot of incredibly risque dialogue (“You don’t want to lick it?” / “You shouldn’t wear that body”), but it’s never gratuitous – it’s essential to getting into Ned’s increasingly erratic headspace.
Mattie weaponises desire within seconds of meeting Ned, drawing him into a trap he doesn’t even realise he’s entered until it’s far too late. Watching a film this unapologetically sensual makes the modern discourse around whether sex scenes are “necessary” feel especially facile. Of course, there are films where intimacy adds texture or character shading – Don’t Look Now, Out Of Sight, and Blue Velvet all come to mind – but in Body Heat, sex and desire are essential to the story.
Both Hurt and Turner are so assured in their roles that you would never guess that this was effectively a career breakthrough for both of them. The chemistry between them still feels dangerous today, every scene between them crackling with tension. Mattie ranks among the great femme fatales, occupying the perfect middle ground between the subtlety of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and the much harder edge of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction. Turner plays her with such careful ambiguity that there’s never a single revelatory “mask off” moment; instead, the audience gradually realises along with Ned just how thoroughly he has been played.
Hurt himself is just as impressive in the less showy role. Ned is by necessity a bit of an idiot, but Hurt makes him just intelligent and likeable enough to root for. He is capable of deception himself, quick-thinking and superficially cynical, which is precisely why he becomes such an ideal target. There’s a wonderful scene where he has been set up by the DA’s office, to be identified by a witness, but he’s canny enough to recognise the trap for what it is, and confidently faces up to the witness himself. Moments like this make his eventual collapse feel tragic rather than merely foolish.
Kasdan populates his film with vivid supporting roles that really bring the film to life. Ted Danson is particularly mercurial as the ever-smiling, ever-dancing District Attorney. Danson laughs and jokes his way through every scene, and it’s never completely clear just how much he suspects his friend. There is a lingering feeling that he is toying with Ned, that he knows how deeply involved he is, but then there’s that final scene between the two, which is painful for just how much goes unsaid. JA Preston brings real gravity to the increasingly frustrated private investigator, who doesn’t want to believe just how far Ned has fallen, and an impossibly young Mickey Rourke steals the two scenes in which he appears – he has so much charisma in his appearances that you know he is destined for greatness.
Today, Kasdan is often remembered more as a screenwriter than a director, thanks to his iconic scripts for Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back. He’s certainly not a director you would associate with a bold visual identity, and yet Body Heat reveals a filmmaker with a far stronger cinematic sensibility than he’s usually credited with. The sweltering Florida heat hangs over every doomed decision like a fever dream, while Kasdan’s use of shadows, shot composition, and hazy lighting evokes classic noir without ever feeling like a lazy homage. Even the sound design contributes to the atmosphere; the recurring motif of the wind chimes hangs over the film like a warning Ned refuses to hear.
What makes Body Heat endure, though, is the incredibly sophisticated storytelling and characterisation. It’s refreshingly old-fashioned, and remarkably economical, every scene pushing the narrative forward while deepening character at the same time. It’s seductive, funny, and genuinely dangerous – not just one of the defining erotic thrillers, but one of the great American neo-noirs.
Special Features
It feels like Criterion is skimping on the extras a little nowadays, focusing more on the picture quality and restorations than the supporting materials, which is a little galling considering how much the price of these has risen. A lot of the special features included here were available on the Premium Collection release – these include deleted scenes, featurettes on the making of, and archive interviews with Hurt and Turner. The new features include an in-depth interview with Kasdan, and a conversation with the film’s editor Carol Littleton and film historian Bobbie O Steen. It all comes down to how much you value an upscaled picture versus the cost of the upgrade.
★★★★★
Out on 4K UHD on June 1st/ William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Ted Danson, JA Preston, Mickey Rourke, Richard Crenna / Dir: Lawrence Kasdan / The Criterion Collection, Warner Bros / 18
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