Stars: William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Richard Crenna, Ted Danson, JA Preston, Mickey Rourke, Kim Zimmer
Director: Lawrence Kasden
Oscar History: Turner received a Best New Star trophy at the Golden Globes, but otherwise the only awards for this movie were green (box office).
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars
Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre). Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.
We will conclude our look at the film noir classics (I've never seen) with 1981's Body Heat, a neo-noir thriller that is most well-known today for launching Kathleen Turner from virtual unknown (this was her film debut, if you can believe it) to movie star overnight. By 1981, the noir had almost completely disappeared from the film market, as we were seeing more action-adventures and slapstick comedies becoming the norm in theaters, which is why it's relatively surprising that this was a big hit back in 1981, making three times its budget and getting Turner Globe & BAFTA nominations. Also, like all films of the 1980's, when they tried to reinvigorate classic Hollywood formulas that appeared long dead, the film's reliance on sex is omnipresent, showing nudity that would have been impossible in the heyday of Gloria Grahame and Gene Tierney. As a result, the noir likely could never be the same again, which makes it the perfect close to our series.
(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Ned Racine (Hurt) a hapless lawyer who starts a steamy affair with Matty (Turner), the married trophy wife of businessman Edmund Walker (Crenna). Early on in the movie, he hits on a woman named Mary Ann Simpson (Zimmer, in a rare pre-Reva Shayne role), which feels odd at the time but becomes crucial later in the film. In a plot plucked out of Double Indemnity, Matty & Ned scheme to murder Edmund (she can't divorce him or risk losing the cash in a prenup), and Ned does this by meeting with Teddy (Rourke), an explosives friend who helps coordinate a bomb that can make it look like arson; Teddy tries desperately to convince Ned not to do this. He does anyway, and after a clear series of missteps that feel perpetrated by Matty herself (where she basically was setting him up, upon the advice of a lawyer that hated Ned & thought he had some comeuppance coming for screwing him over), Ned is basically implicated in the crime by two investigators (Danson & Preston). Ned's last shot at redemption goes up in smoke when Matty is supposedly killed in a boathouse explosion that was intended for Ned (or so we think at the time), sending him to jail. From jail, we learn that Ned is convinced Matty was not Matty at all, but the real Mary Ann Simpson, who had taken on Matty's identity to marry Edmund for his money, and that the actual Matty Tyler (who is the Mary Ann Simpson we met at the beginning of the film) died in the boathouse explosion. A look at her yearbook confirms this, and we see in the final closing moments of the film that Matty is now on a beach, her entire scheme working perfectly.
The film strays from the traditional noir trope in a couple of ways, almost entirely because of the lack of censors. The film's sex scenes are extensive (though apparently they got even more lascivious in the initial cut of the picture), as we see both Hurt & Turner in various states of undress (they make a point, in a nod to Chinatown, to pronounce the weather being perpetually hot, matching the attitudes of the already randy leads). Perhaps more damning is that Matty/Mary Ann gets away with everything. In the days of Phyllis Dietrichson and Kathie Moffat, she'd either need to die or go to jail, but we aren't living in that world and as a result the film noir trope gets totally upended because the villain (though by far the film's most interesting character) is able to skate out of the room with no bruises, just a pile of money and a sexy new man next to her on the beach.
Turner owns the picture. Hurt, Danson, Crenna, they're all good, but they don't come close to what she was doing here; about the only male cast member who comes near her is Rourke in a bit role, playing an undeniably sexy arsonist who is also the film's best voice-of-reason (that, because he's a convicted crook, no one listens to). Turner would spend the next decade alternating between marital discord films like Peggy Sue Got Married & The War of the Roses and straight-up romantic comedies like Romancing the Stone & Jewel of the Nile, but she may never have been as good as she is here, playing Matty as the ultimate, successful femme fatale. William Hurt never stood a chance the second she coyly jumps onto the screen-it's entirely her picture, and she nails a debut that hallmarked her as one of the 1980's most important screen idols.
Previous Films in the Series: The Long Goodbye, Sweet Smell of Success, The Killing, The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, Gun Crazy, Night and the City, In a Lonely Place, They Live By Night, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, The Killers, The Woman in the Window, The Big Sleep
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