The Seediest Noir Thriller Just Got A Huge Upgrade

The erotic thrillers of the ‘80s and ‘90s were a fruitful, salacious era of Hollywood neo-noir, with studios eager to pair up actors and actresses who had a healthy mix of great chemistry and bad vibes. Genre-wise, erotic thrillers share the most DNA with classic noir, where criminally-inclined men and femme fatales coax and backstab each other, often to bitter ends. But it’s a long walk from Billy Wilder’s acclaimed Double Indemnity to trashy fare like Wild Things.

Halfway between the two is Body Heat, which led the first wave of erotic thrillers in 1981 by modeling itself closely on Wilder’s film, updating it with as much sleaze and sin as writer-director Lawrence Kasdan and stars William Hurt and Kathleen Turner could muster. With Body Heat just reissued by the Criterion Collection in a new 4K edition, you should learn how deep its classic noir roots go.

How was Body Heat received upon release?

As Body Heat was Kasdan’s first film as director, there were no real expectations. But thanks to a little company named Lucasfilm, his screenwriting career was going great — Kasdan co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark in collaboration with George Lucas, who helped Kasdan get Body Heat off the ground. The film was a hit, earning $24 million on a $9 million budget and mostly impressing critics, although critical giants Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert disagreed over the quality of Turner’s femme fatale performance. 45 years on, it’s clear that Ebert was right, and Kael was unfair to Turner: she’s the best femme fatale of the ‘80s.

Why is Body Heat important to see now?

Films like Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Blue Velvet, and Body Double run the gamut from explorations of cinematic voyeurism to hacky, twist-filled trash, but their shared beats — infidelity, conspiracy, seduction, blackmail, and murder — give the genre its cynical, pleasure-oriented ethos, a world of liars trying to level up no matter who’s collateral damage. In Body Heat, scuzzy Florida lawyer Ned Racine (Hurt) is scooped up in a late-night bar by Matty Walker (Turner), and their sordid affair breeds a plot to kill her businessman husband (Richard Crenna). But Ned, the easy mark that he is, mistakes Matty’s frankness for a sign of equal intelligence; in reality, she’s miles ahead of him, setting him up for professional embarrassment and police suspicion.

Hurt is wonderful as a horny, sad-sack loser who bites off more than he can chew, buzzing with the same intensity of desire as Turner’s Matty but with little of her calculated, focused emotion. They also have sizzling on-screen chemistry. As Wilder’s Double Indemnity was made during the Hays Code days, the 1944 film shows no nudity, sex, or displays of demented lust. The members of its husband-killing pact (Fred MacMurray as an insurance salesman and Barbara Stanwyck as a neglected wife) are more evenly matched in shrewdness and paranoia, and the goal of Double Indemnity is the titular insurance payout; staging the husband’s murder as a train accident would result in much more cash.

Stanwyck’s character comes to MacMurray’s not as a seductress, but as a client, and their criminal tryst feels more calculated and mutually beneficial than recklessly adventurous. One significant narrative change is referenced in Body Heat’s title: everything is hotter, from the sweltering Florida humidity to the explicit sex that sweeps up Ned and Matty, and ultimately distracts him from the danger of what he's undertaking. As a bomb-making accomplice played by a young Mickey Rourke tells him, there are countless ways for their “perfect crime” to go wrong, and being in heat for too long will make you act crazy.

Kasdan deploys a classical style for his noir, and during early seduction scenes, the director pays attention to the distance between the characters and the geography of the public and private spaces. When Matty closes the door of her porch on Ned and watches her scorned suitor from inside her husband's home, Ned is enraged at his new physical obstacles, and he forces his way inside. He doesn't realize that his fiery emotions have been played with by a woman who's capable of acting less impulsively.

This leads to a key component of adulterous noirs, where the protagonist slowly reconsiders the motives of the co-conspirator they're now tied to. It's not until the end that the entire picture becomes clear; so tempted was the protagonist by the ill-advised prize on offer and the vulnerable candidness of the femme fatale that he believes she feeds him. By resurrecting the fundamentals of one of the best noir films, Body Heat proved classic Hollywood’s most cynical genre never went out of style, but had plenty to say about a scuzzier, messier world.

What new features does the Body Heat 4K Blu-ray have?

Criterion has been reissuing classics from its collection in 4K for almost five years now, and its restorations continue to impress. The digital restoration of Body Heat has been supervised by the film’s editor, Carol Littleton (E.T., The Manchurian Candidate), and approved by Kasdan himself. Both Littleton and Kasdan appear on the supplementary features, with a new interview with the director and a conversation between Littleton and film historian Bobbie O’Steen. All of the interviews with cast (William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Ted Danson) and crew from Criterion’s non-4K edition are here too, and there’s a new essay by crime author and TV writer Megan Abbott (The Deuce, Dare Me) for your reading pleasure.