Body Heat is a watchable but inferior neo-noir homage to the "darling, let's kill your husband" adultery classics Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice - mainly Double Indemnity. Although the premise is the same in all three films, the plot details are too diverse for Body Heat to be called a remake of either of the older features; however, almost every significant character in Double Indemnity has his or her parallel in Body Heat, which one can't say of The Postman Always Rings Twice.
The 1981 film's biggest problem is a structural one: the first act, setting up the motive of sexual obsession, goes on far too long. The reason it goes on so long is its second problem: too much explicit sex. This isn't a prudish complaint, but a dramatic one. Explicit sex is dramatically null because it practically never advances the story and it seldom even illuminates character; usually it just stops a film dead, and the longer it goes on, the deader it stops it. (It also alienates those viewers, such as myself, who don't care to be invited to be voyeurs.)
Consequently, Body Heat - a densely plotted film even by noir standards - is left with an awful lot of plot to pack into its second act, and the second half's dialogue and structure suffer from the need to make every line and scene contribute to the explication. A complicated story isn't a bad thing in itself. If it's clearly told - as in David Mamet's labyrinthine House of Games - we can follow it first time around. To say that the plot of Body Heat needs several viewings to be understood, as some reviewers on this site have quite rightly said, is not really a compliment.
To look on the positive side, which involves overlooking the blandness of William Hurt and Kathleen Turner's performances (compare them with the guilt-fired sexual derangement of Lana Turner, Fred MacMurray and John Garfield in the older films), there are good things about Body Heat. Ted Danson plays the film's most amiable role, that of Hurt's best friend, almost as touchingly as Edward G Robinson in the corresponding part in Double Indemnity. Mickey Rourke reminds us poignantly of the years when he was a very good actor. The Florida-summer setting is effectively employed as a perverse, ironic reversal of the traditional noir backdrop of darkness and rain. And it has aged gracefully: nothing about it screams 1980s! at you.
The film as a whole is a professional, intelligently manufactured piece of work that sets out to entertain a grown-up audience. That it looks like a classic to so many film fans today, however, is mainly a comment on how limited and juvenile are the ambitions of mainstream Hollywood cinema less than one generation later.
The 1981 film's biggest problem is a structural one: the first act, setting up the motive of sexual obsession, goes on far too long. The reason it goes on so long is its second problem: too much explicit sex. This isn't a prudish complaint, but a dramatic one. Explicit sex is dramatically null because it practically never advances the story and it seldom even illuminates character; usually it just stops a film dead, and the longer it goes on, the deader it stops it. (It also alienates those viewers, such as myself, who don't care to be invited to be voyeurs.)
Consequently, Body Heat - a densely plotted film even by noir standards - is left with an awful lot of plot to pack into its second act, and the second half's dialogue and structure suffer from the need to make every line and scene contribute to the explication. A complicated story isn't a bad thing in itself. If it's clearly told - as in David Mamet's labyrinthine House of Games - we can follow it first time around. To say that the plot of Body Heat needs several viewings to be understood, as some reviewers on this site have quite rightly said, is not really a compliment.
To look on the positive side, which involves overlooking the blandness of William Hurt and Kathleen Turner's performances (compare them with the guilt-fired sexual derangement of Lana Turner, Fred MacMurray and John Garfield in the older films), there are good things about Body Heat. Ted Danson plays the film's most amiable role, that of Hurt's best friend, almost as touchingly as Edward G Robinson in the corresponding part in Double Indemnity. Mickey Rourke reminds us poignantly of the years when he was a very good actor. The Florida-summer setting is effectively employed as a perverse, ironic reversal of the traditional noir backdrop of darkness and rain. And it has aged gracefully: nothing about it screams 1980s! at you.
The film as a whole is a professional, intelligently manufactured piece of work that sets out to entertain a grown-up audience. That it looks like a classic to so many film fans today, however, is mainly a comment on how limited and juvenile are the ambitions of mainstream Hollywood cinema less than one generation later.