Body Heat

1981 noir retooling

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Ned Devine, a womanizing lawyer, is trying his best to sweat through a hotter-than-hot summer. He meets married and rich Matty Walker whose husband is conveniently out of town five days a week. They become friends and have many adventures together, mostly playing badminton. One sultry afternoon, Matty serves wildly, and the couple watch their last shuttlecock somersault right into the gutter. Oh, snap! Without a shuttlecock, they can't play badminton. They brainstorm substitute activities and finally decide on having sex and killing Matty's husband which, if you think about it, is a lot like badminton.

Here's my favorite thing about this movie: It is so reminiscent of other movies, borderline ordinary even. On the surface, it seems derivative, a modern update on noir. It's like somebody was carrying around a box of noir and accidentally dropped it down the stairs and all the noir shattered and scattered all over the place so the clumsy guy had to clean up the mess and piece it all back together and glued pieces together randomly and came up with Body Heat. That might sound like a bad thing, but in this case, I don't think it is. Although everything about Body Heat is familiar, I can't place exactly where I've seen any of it, although there's a whole lot of Double Indemnity. Oddly enough, the borrowing of ideas, moods, textures, and maybe even shots somehow makes this seem timeless. This is stylish, right from the opening shot of Hurt watching a fire from his hotel window. I really liked the jazzy score and the banter between Ned and Matty. I thought it was great how their "hookin' up" (or whatever the youngsters are calling it these days) was stretched out and developed, almost to the point where you were on the edge of your seat waiting for the couple to finally get naked. Steamy stuff, so steamy that I had to wipe off my glasses. There's also great mystery burbling beneath the action of this movie; you know something is askew although you can't quite figure out exactly what that is. There were a few awkward moments. The conversation the married couple and Ned have at the restaurant seems contrived, and I think every scene with the niece could have been deleted. I had questions about the random appearance of a clown, the use of the word "dorkus," and a strange scene where everybody in a room decides to smoke at the same time except for the flamboyant Ted Danson. I also had to rewind and pause one scene so that I could read the writing on a bathroom wall:

"Eat my shorts"
"Death to tourists"
"Sofa sucks"?
"Big Al eats here"
"Whip it good"
"Surf Punks"

This was a Cory recommendation.