Andrew Sarris

“….And what a woman! Kathleen Turner’s Matty Walker is right up there with Jane Greer in Out of the Past as what the late James Agee was wont to describe as a “dish.” Just when we were beginning to wonder if there was anything on the screen in the realm of the filmic feminine between Bo Derek and Meryl Streep, there has emerged a succession of full-bodied females lacking neither intelligence nor ensuality. Kathleen Turner joins Jessica Lange in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Lisa Eichhorn in Cutter’s Way, and Kate Nelligan in The Eye of the Needle, among others, as torchbearers of grown-up passions.

“The successful chemistry of William Hurt and Kathleen Turner in the steamy sex scenes of Body Heat becomes its own justification….

“Kathleen Turner comes from the television soaps, among a few other professional showcases, and ther is nothing extraordinarily original about the enticingly predatory character of her Matty Walker. We ses a clone of Matty Walker almost every week on television in one private eye series or another. The brainy dame with the bottom line etched in the depths of her sould represents the nourish side of the woman’s movement. Still, there are dames and there are dames. Turner and Kasdan provide Matty Walker with extra does of wit and relentlessness. The first pick-up scene of Hurt and Turner bears comparison with the best of Bogey and Bacall in To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep….”

Andrew Sarris
Village Voice, September 2-8, 1981

Postscript. ‘Katleen Turner Turns a Corner’ with Romancing the Stone in 1984: “One might say a star is born when one begins mentally casting her for everything in sight. And so it is for me with Kathleen Turner at this moment in film history….” Village Voice, April ?, 1984