Stephen Schiff

“The great film noirs of the ‘40s and ‘50s mirrored a realization that seemed to hit postwar America all at once: that even in utopia, in a land flushed with victory and prosperity, personal destinies could remain terrifying…. Most of the best film noirs … are about fairly ordinary men living dangerously ordinary lives, until something crosses their path and sets their darkest dreams aflame…. [T]he black cats are usually women, and extraordinary women at that—women who know that they’re igniting dreams, and know how to make those dreams seem to come true. Femmes fatales.

“We don’t often see film noirs these days, and maybe that’s because we don’t often see femmes fatales in the movies. This is a consequence of the age. The willful, ravenous sexuality of a Rita Hayworth, a Barbara Stanwyck, or a Jane Greer is out of fashion now, and that’s not because women don’t want to see it (the femme fatales is, after all, alive and well and living in the soap operas). It’s because the men don’t. Groping for the meaning of masculinity, contemporary men may find the broad-shouldered she-wolves of the ‘40s and ‘50s a bit threatening; how much easier it is to contemplate the innocent, vulnerable sexuality of child-women like Farrah Fawcett, Brooke Shields, or Bo Derek. But what would happen if a modern shlub met a classic femme fatale? Perhaps he would turn away and dismiss her, thinking, “It’s only a movie.” Then again, he might be too big a dreamer for that. Perhaps he would be like the feckless lawyer William Hurt plays in Lawrence Kasdan’s bewitching new movie Body Heat…-- a movie in which the femme fatale returns to the screen and brings all the humid glamour of the film noir with her.

“…. [V]ery quickly we learn that Ned’s a third-rate womanizer and a fourth-rate barrister; that he lives in a crummy little town near Miami, and that he probably always will…. [O]ne night, at an outdoor dance, … a woman rises out of the audience like an apparition—a woman in a white dress, with cascading hair and a cool, sensual walk. Hurt plays the scene beautifully: when he sees her, he looks as if he’d been slapped. The very existence of this elegant, long-legged beauty casts his whole life into shadow. The nurses [he usually went for], the clients, the town, the heat—all feel unutterably shabby and degrading. This woman is like a sex goddess from an old movie, but she seems more real than anything he knows. And so he has no choice. He follows her….

“The movie stands or falls with Hurt’s performance, … one of the most exciting movie performances of the year….

“But Kathleen Turner, a newcomer who’s worked in the soaps, has some awkward scenes, and so does the movie… Turner destroys a pivotal sequence in which she has to breathe one of Kasdan’s worst lines: ‘I’d kill myself if I thought this thing would destroy us.’ She isn’t a terrific actress, but she doesn’t have to be: she only has to be a terrific image. If you leave Body Heat struggling to remember what she looks like, that’s not because she’s not memorable—with her flaring, hungry nostrils and her husky voice, she is. It’s because Kasdan makes her flicker: she’s the fire in Body Heat. And like the femme fatale in every film noir, she’s also the ice.”

Stephen Schiff
The Boston Phoenix, Sept. 22, 1981