Review of Body Heat (1981) by Wrik S — 22 Nov 2009

"You better take me up on this quick or else in about forty-five minutes I'm gonna get up and walk away".

Of course it's impossible to watch this without thinking of Double Indemnity, though Lawrence Kasdan's movie has too many brilliant ideas of its own - that ingenious final twist among them - to be dismissed as a mere rip-off or an affectionate pastiche of classic noir. In fact, unconstrained by Forties censorship and the Hayes Code's stipulation that crime must not be seen to pay, Body Heat actually improves upon Billy Wilder's masterpiece in a couple of key respects. While cleverly letting the Florida climate create most of his steamy atmosphere for him, Kasdan is able to present a more explicit - and therefore more credible - portrait of a good man driven to murder by obsessive lust. For a first film, Kasdan's direction is supremely confident and the cast list (William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Mickey Rourke, Ted Danson) reads like a Who's Who of people who were going places in the early Eighties.