Re: Body Heat 2010 Hollywood Movie 18
Linda Berens
Inthis heat, Matty seems cool. Early in the film there is a justly famous scenewhere Matty brings Ned home from a bar, allegedly to listen to her wind chimes,and then asks him to leave. He leaves, then returns, and looks through a windownext to her front door. She stands inside, dressed in red, calmly returning hisgaze. He picks up a chair and throws it through the window, and in the nextshot they are embracing. Knowing what we know about Matty, look once again ather expression as she looks back at him. She looks as confident and absorbed asa child who has pushed a button and is waiting for a video game to respond.
His father was cinematographer Benjamin H. Kline (Danger Street, Fireside Theatre, dozens of Westerns), and one of his uncles, Phil Rosen, co-founded the American Society of Cinematographers in 1919 and served as its first president.
Hurt received the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for Kiss of the Spider Woman, and the film grossed $17 million, huge for an indie at the time. (The drama took years to get into theaters, and Burt Lancaster was originally set to portray Luis.)
In the heat of a relentless summer, Ned Racine, an inept South Florida lawyer, meets and begins an affair with Matty Walker. Matty's wealthy husband, Edmund, is always away on business during the week. Late one night, Ned arrives at the Walker mansion and, seeing Matty in the gazebo, playfully propositions her. The woman is actually Mary Ann Simpson, Matty's old high school friend who physically resembles her and who is briefly in town. Soon after, Matty tells Ned she wants a divorce, but a prenuptial agreement would leave her almost nothing. When she wishes Edmund was dead, Ned suggests murdering him so Matty can inherit his wealth. Ned consults a shady former client, Teddy Lewis, an explosives expert, who provides Ned a small incendiary device though he advises Ned to abandon his plans.
After murdering Edmund, Ned and Matty move his body to an abandoned building that Edmund owns. Ned detonates the bomb to make it appear as if Edmund accidentally died during a botched arson attempt. Soon after, Edmund's lawyer contacts Ned about a new will that Ned supposedly drafted for Edmund and which was witnessed by Mary Ann Simpson. The new will was improperly prepared, making it null and void and results in Matty inheriting Edmund's entire fortune, while disinheriting his sister. Despite Ned's previous warning against making any estate changes, Matty had forged the new will, exploiting Ned's past malpractice issues, knowing it would be nullified and leaving her the sole beneficiary. Ned knows the police will consider the new will suspicious. A prominent plot point centers on a complicated and often misunderstood legal rule known as the rule against perpetuities.
Matty calls Ned and says that Edmund's glasses are in her boathouse. Ned arrives late that night and spots a wire attached to the boathouse door. Matty arrives, and, following a confrontation, Ned asks her to retrieve the glasses. Meanwhile, Oscar Grace arrives and observes their interaction. To prove herself, Matty walks toward the boathouse and disappears from view; the boathouse then explodes. A body found inside is identified as Matty Walker (née Tyler). Now in prison, Ned, having realized Matty duped him, tries to convince Oscar Grace that she is still alive. He believes that "Matty" assumed the real Matty Tyler's identity in order to marry and murder Edmund. Ned surmises the "Mary Ann Simpson" that Ned previously met had discovered the scheme and was blackmailing Matty, only to be murdered and her body used to identify her as Edmund's wife. Had Ned been killed in the boathouse explosion as Matty likely intended, he reasons the police would have found both suspects' bodies.
"You know that most of the movie takes place at night and it was especially cold, but we were trying to create the impression of heat," Kasdan told the Post in 2000. "When Ted is dancing on the pier and Bill is in shorts and a T-shirt, it was freezing."
Released on Aug. 28, 1981, "Body Heat" opened quietly and without much fanfare in its debut weekend, finishing 10 spots behind No. 1-ranked "Raiders of the Lost Ark," which Kasdan had written. But by its fourth weekend in theaters, "Body Heat" had jumped all the way to second at the box office, just behind another Kasdan-scripted film -- the John Belushi-driven romantic comedy "Continental Divide."
The Hollywood icon is out with a new book this year called \"Kathleen Turner on Acting: Conversations about Film, Television, and Theater\" -- essentially a masterclass in life, for actors and non-actors alike.
Okay, the literal translation of "noir" is "black." "Film Noir" means "black film." and refers both to the blackness in the hearts of the characters, referring also to "night," and also to the black & white photography, HEAVY on the black, in the early noirs. There was actually discussion when BODY HEAT came out as to whether a film could truely be Film Noir when it was in color, as BODY HEAT is, visually, more of a Film Burnt Sienna. But given that it is such an utter James M. Cain steal (Really, the Cain estate should have sued), its heart, in so far as it has one, was purest film noir, and the color noir film was established.
I remember loving it in theaters, where I saw it at least three times, though not again since. And unlike Rinaldo, this gay viewer found the undraped William Hurt of that era very attractive indeed. Not so much nowadays, but in BODY HEAT and ALTERED STATES, hubba hubba.
I no longer recall exactly how it ends, but I don't remember being at all confused, whereas the endings of DOUBLE INDEMNITY and THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (the former particularly, and the latter only applying to the John Garfield version) took more than one viewing to totally figure out. It's clear WHAT happens, but not why. Some of the legal manuevering by the lawyer towards the end of POSTMAN is mucho confusing (and is in the book as well.) The ending of the novel DOUBLE INDMENITY really sucks. They go on a cruise and commit suicide together. Wilder and Chandler much improved it. The sex in the novel of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RIGNS TWICE is unbeliavably steamy. When they kill the husband, they get so turned on that the have sex beside the fresh corpse, in the wreckage of the car. Yikes!
Anyway, BODY HEAT is a very good movie. I must watch it again. (I just ten minutes ago finished watching the Ken Russell VALENTINO, from that same era, and my GOD what a DREADFUL movie. I hadn't seen it again since its initial release. I was wise to avoid it.)
How dated am I? I have to ask, Who is Jake Kasdan and why should I know his name, beyond his being Lawrence Kasdan's son? Whereas Lawrence Kasdan is a major player in 1980s movies. Doesn't everyone know of Lawrence Kasdan?
I saw 'Body Heat' in the theatre and recall liking it but being confused by the ending. I thought that Kasden's screenplay for 'Continental Divide' reached the screen before 'Body Heat', but it appears that BH was released first. ('Continental Divide'is a personal favorite.) I also remember being more impressed with the secondary characters-Crenna, Danson and Rourke-than with the leads.
I like this movie very much, but it's hardly flawless. What does work supremely well is Kathleen Turner's performance--she's not only sexy, but she has the presence and authority of a very fine stage actress (as for her subsequent weight gain, it's the result of taking steroids to control rheumatic arthritis, a very nasty autoimmune disease that attacks the joints and makes life VERY difficult for the people--mostly women--who suffer from it).
William Hurt is an altogether lesser performer here. The role called for an actor who could project doomy romanticism, and Hurt wasn't it. He's competent and does nicely by the comic moments in the film, but is otherwise unremarkable. I've always thought that Michael Gambon, who was only about 40 at the time that this was made, would have been a much better choice, but I'm known for having weird taste.
There are two unsung heroes on this film--the cinematographer, Richard Kline, who gave the film its rich, stylized look, particularly in the nighttime scenes, and also did a wizardly job of conveying a sense of oppressive heat hanging over the setting (the movie was, in fact, shot in the relative cool of the Florida winter, I believe). The other was the costume designer, Renie Conley. At the time the film was made, she'd been in the business over 40 years and had worked at RKO for a long time, shifting between "A" and "B" pictures with ease (she also shared in a 1963 Oscar for her work on the Taylor-Burton version of CLEOPATRA). She did a very shrewd job of suggesting 40's Hollywood in modern clothing, particularly the white blouse and red skirt that Kathleen Turner wears for the Big Sex Scene with Hurt (you know, where he smashes the French doors with the chair).
One of my problems with the sex scenes is that Turner was doing all of the work--she's parading her anatomy about while her co-star's Naughty Bits are all discreetly off-screen. The other thing is that most of these scenes feel strained and phony--there's more heat in the moment when Turner stubs out a cigarette with the toe of her shoe than in all of the heavy breathing that follows.
I saw Body Heat in West Palm Beach 1981 when it was released. A lot of the film was shot in the greater West Palm Beach area, and I believe this was one of two or three cities where it was shown as an early premier. Maybe that accounts for why the version I saw is different I than have ever seen on any video or TV version--I don't know about early VHS versions--and different from what most reviews imply, either directly or implicitly by lack of note.
What I am talking about is that most of the sex scenes that were in the theatrical version I saw have been severely edited or deleted. In the interview with the film editor in the Blu-ray version, she says, "Obviously, there was more graphic footage but we felt less was better" or something to that effect. Apparently that was an afterthought, because the version I saw had close-up full frontal nudity of Kathleen Turner, and what you see now is the ends of the sex scenes, which were pretty much the same as the softcore porn they show on Cinemax.
Has anyone else seen the version I'm speaking of?