Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen HOT TICKETS JUST LIKE THE OLD DAYS I don't see as many movies as I used to. I know I've complained about this before, but it still bothers me. The movies I've had to cut out, because of...
...Many nights later, having bludgeoned her husband to death in that same front hall, Ned falls back exhausted onto the floor as she had in her passion earlier, and the camera is again low down...
...In this steamy Florida atmosphere, our senses are slightly dulled, our grip on reality loosened...
...Like the man says, you can stay around a long, long time...
...Get a wife," she suggests coolly...
...The line he tried to pick her up with was, "You can stand here with me as long as you don't talk about the heat...
...From the stickiness of sex, Kasdan edges us toward the feeling that sex is also intertwined, inseparably, with violence...
...Kasdan's own style begins with a little fudging on reality...
...The zebra stripe of sunlight squinting through the Venetian blinds at this moment is a touch from Stanwyck's living room in the earlier movie...
...It's not only Ned's problem, but Lawrence Kasdan's...
...She walks toward the ocean, hoping to catch a breeze, and Ned follows her...
...In a movie where nobody ever lets slip their true feelings, where everybody has ulterior motives and something to conceal, how things really stand has to be shown in a lot of subtle, sub-textural ways...
...They are not only sub-textural, but subliminal...
...In the forties, the studios provided novice movie-makers with an apprenticeship, an opportunity to learn technique...
...You see, she was telling the truth from the very beginning...
...In fact, Body Heat is so self-contained, it's claustrophobic, which is one reason that it works...
...Get me a wet towel," she commands...
...I tried to take in as many movies of that kind and time as I could find...
...That line was such an inept opening gambit that Matty couldn't help smiling...
...Body Heat is a re-make of Double Indemnity, from which Kasdan has lifted both his story and the personalities of his characters...
...I'll even wipe it off," he says, still smiling, and heading for the bathrooms across the boardwalk...
...she asks as he disappears in the men's room door...
...The band is playing "That Old Feeling," which is just what I'm getting...
...After Ned buys Matty a cherry snow cone, he starts coming on, telling her how much he needs someone to "rub my tired muscles and smooth my sheets...
...A few other touches, making us feel the oppressiveness of the heat, come out of Key Largo...
...You don't have to know ancient history like Double Indemnity to know what gives here...
...Or would they remain as inexhaustibly wonderful as they seemed...
...Through this chink in credibility oozes a lot of Body Heat's atmosphere...
...The movies I've had to cut out, because of other demands on my time, are the oldies but goodies...
...The proof of this kind of movie is in its ending...
...I became so obsessive that I once read all the New York Times reviews from 1940 to 1960, trying to figure out how many movies that I'd never seen were films noirs...
...This neat trick is what takes style...
...If only one of us could have seen, right then, what would happen...
...But now a young director coming up has to learn it all on his own...
...It took me a month, off and on...
...That line breaks the ice, the clump of it in Matty's snowcone cup, from which she spills cherry syrup over the bosom of her white dress as she laughs...
...As we see, if only we could recognize it, when Ned lands on his back on the hall floor, now he's the one being screwed...
...As she sprawls on her back, the camera hugs the floor like a referee at a wrestling match looking for a pin...
...This is not to say that Kasdan, as either a writer or a director, has had to invent movies from scratch...
...Muy calido," says the man next to her: "It's hot...
...If I fail all those tests, then you can say that it's just a re-creation of a genre...
...If I could actually see those movies as plentifully as current releases, would I find their quality as uneven...
...Kasdan is therefore able to stylize his film by just that bit he needs...
...One of these is when Ned is parking his red Corvette on a Miami street the afternoon before the murder, and he sees an old, red Mercury convertible, late forties vintage, drive by...
...For the benefit of that guy in Des Moines, Kasdan has made a movie that's pretty self-contained...
...Both become forms of secretion...
...It has to surprise us, yet make us feel that it was inevitable...
...If you could take a 25-year-old man from Des Moines, and have him see Body Heat, I hope that he can relate to William Hurt's character as a modern person and that the things he does make sense to him...
...It takes technique, which is beyond most directors today...
...There was Altman's The Long Goodbye several years ago, and right now there are two around - True Confessions, based on John Gregory Dunne's sensational novel, and, better still, Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat...
...Sometimes he has even lifted the style, as when Ned first suggests to Matty that they kill her husband (Richard Crenna...
...Prowling about, he can see her standing in the front hall, still waiting, expectant, aroused...
...As he pointed out in a Boston paper when his film opened there, "I conceived of Body Heat...
...Almost never, anyhow...
...As he stops to listen to a band concert, a woman in a white dress with a peek-a-boo slit gets up to leave...
...At that moment, Matty is lying on the beach of a volcanic island in the tropics somewhere...
...Every once in a while Kasdan gives us a direct glimpse into the paranoia and manipulation, the near hallucination, where the events in this movie really occur...
...She sees him, too, and when he throws a chair through glass doors to get at her, she is ready to be had...
...At the end of Body Heat, Ned is looking at Matty's picture in her high-school yearbook...
...There's a lost romance just in the titles alone...
...That kind of movie used to comprise about half of what I saw, and when I quit seeing it, moviegoing got depressing...
...Since self-education is the hardest kind, not many succeed at it as well as Kasdan has...
...This scene where Ned tries to pick up Matty (Kathleen Turner) has the sharpest backchat I've heard since Fred MacMurray began trying to sell insurance to Barbara Stanwyck at about the same point in Double Indemnity...
...He does so as if style were rope, and he wanted to play out just enough of it for his characters to hang themselves...
...Just when you think a dame's got one thing on her mind, it turns out she's got another...
...I used to wonder, in fact, whether I could ever scrape the bottom of that barrel...
...When I added those whose reviews made them sound right to the ones I had seen, the list ran around 1,000 titles...
...Body Heat is full of tenuous little connections like this, mute visual clues to the real crime being committed...
...Though no one of them is noticeable, they add up...
...But again, it is what we're shown, rather than what we're told, that makes us believers...
...A black police detective who is a pal of Ned's says as much...
...You ain't never gonna see the like o' that again...
...On their second meeting, for instance, Ned birddogs Matty all the way home, but is then thrown out, rejected, once more...
...How banal can you get...
...Behind the wheel is a man in a clown costume...
...But when he re-emerges with the dampened paper towel, she's gone...
...Shortly after the beginning of Body Heat, Ned Racine (William Hurt) wanders along a boardwalk, trying to escape the heat that swelters even after dark in the little Florida town where he practices law...
...I only need it for tonight," he replies, smiling...
...We know that Florida is air-conditioned up to its chattering teeth today, but Kasdan gets us to accept the premise that the air-conditioners are all on the fritz in this town, that the heat wave is unprecedented, etc...
...I wonder whether Ned still remembers that first meeting between them the way I do...
...It wasn't only the classics I saw, though...
...This is always the problem in this kind of movie...
...The two acts become so intertwined that they are reduced to a single bodily function...
...The amazing thing is that every once in a while you do see a movie as good as those...
...There have been signs all along that despite his smooth talk, Ned is a man of self-destructive extremes...
...You're dumb," she said, "I like that in a man...
...Underneath, it says, "Ambition: To Be Rich and Live in an Exotic Land...
...You don't want to lick it...
...It has to reveal to us what we already know - that these people were doomed, each trapped by the fate of his own character...
...colin l. westerbeck, jr.lin l. westerbeck, jr...
...The remark reminds me of what Ned said to her that first night on the boardwalk...
...That's what style is, invisible accumulation of the evidence...
...Ned and Matty spend most of their time sweating and screwing, screwing and sweating...
...It gives us a lizard-eye view of their love-making, as if the heat had driven some primeval creature out of the Florida swamp and into the house to watch them...
...The period I liked best was the one in America right after the war, the time of film noir - The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, The Big Heat...
...That takes style...
...as an homage to film noir . . . [But] people that go to these movies across the country are experiencing them for the first time...
...He's someone who, literally, jogs and smokes at the same time...
...People never mean what they say...
...But Kasdan knows he can't succeed in the present by aping the past...
Vol. 108 • December 1981 • No. 23
