Women are the source of most of the trouble in Bob’s world. Anne’s imprudence is repaired in the film, but there is also betrayal from the wife of a casino employee, who finds out about the plot from her husband. Melville liked women, Cauchy tells us, but he preferred to hang out with his pals, talking about the movies. Bob gets Anne a job as a bar girl in a nightclub, notes her quick advancement to cigarette girl and then to “hostess,” and tries his best to prevent Marc from becoming her pimp.
One night, perhaps because despite her coldness she feels a certain gratitude, she hands Bob a flower. The gesture must have meant something to Melville, whose Le Cercle Rouge also has a man being offered a flower by a cigarette girl.
The climax of Bob le Flambeur involves surprising developments that approach cosmic irony. How strange, that a man’s incorrigible nature would lead him both into and through temptation. The twist is so inspired that many other directors have borrowed it, including Paul Thomas Anderson in Hard Eight, Neil Jordan in The Good Thief, and Lewis Milestone and Steven Soderbergh, the directors of the Ocean’s Eleven movies. But Bob is not about the twist. It is about Bob being true to his essential nature. He is a gambler.
Body Heat
R, 113 m., 1981
William Hurt (Ned Racine), Kathleen Turner (Matty Walker), Richard Crenna (Edmund Walker), Ted Danson (Peter Lowenstein), J. A. Preston (Oscar Grace), Mickey Rourke (Teddy Lewis). Directed by Lawrence Kasdan and produced by Fred T. Gallo. Screenplay by Kasdan.
Like a tantalizing mirage, film noir haunts modern filmmakers. Noir is the genre of night, guilt, violence, and illicit passion, and no genre is more seductive. But the best noirs were made in the 1940s and ’50s, before directors consciously knew what they were doing (“We called them B movies,” said Robert Mitchum).
Once the French named the genre, once a generation of filmmakers came along who had seen noirs at cinematheques instead of in fleapits, noir could never again be naive. One of the joys of a great noir like Detour (1954) is the feeling that it was made by people who took the story perfectly seriously. One of the dangers of modern self-conscious noir, as Pauline Kael wrote in her scathing dismissal of Body Heat, is that an actress like Kathleen Turner comes across as if she were following the marks on the floor made by the actresses who preceded her.
And yet if bad modern noir can play like a parody, good noir still has the power to seduce. Yes, Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981) is aware of the films that inspired it—especially Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944). But it has a power that transcends its sources. It exploits the personal style of its stars to insinuate itself; Kael is unfair to Turner, who in her debut role played a woman so sexually confident that we can believe her lover (William Hurt) could be dazed into doing almost anything for her. The moment we believe that, the movie stops being an exercise and starts working. (I think the moment occurs in the scene where she leads Hurt by her hand in that manner a man is least inclined to argue with.)
Women are rarely allowed to be bold and devious in the movies; most directors are men, and they see women as goals, prizes, enemies, lovers, and friends, but rarely as protagonists. Turner’s entrance in Body Heat announces that she is the film’s center of power. It is a hot, humid night in Florida. Hurt, playing a cocky but lazy lawyer named Ned Racine, is strolling on a pier where an exhausted band is listlessly playing. He is behind the seated audience. We can see straight down the center aisle to the bandstand. All is dark and red and orange. Suddenly a woman in white stands up, turns around, and walks straight toward him. This is Matty Walker. To see her is to need her.
Turner in her first movie role was an intriguing original. Slender, with hair down to her shoulders, she evoked aspects of Barbara Stanwyck and Lauren Bacall. But the voice, with its elusive hint of a Latin accent, was challenging. She had “angry eyes,” the critic David Thomson observed. And a slight overbite (later corrected, I think) gave a playful edge to her challenging dialogue (“You’re not too smart, are you?” she says soon after meeting him. “I like that in a man.”)
Hurt had been in one movie before Body Heat (Ken Russell’s Altered States in 1980). He was still unfamiliar: a tall, already balding, indolently handsome man with a certain lazy arrogance to his speech, as if amused by his own intelligence. Body Heat is a movie about a woman who gets a man to commit murder for her. It is important that the man not be a dummy; he needs to be smart enough to think of the plan himself. One of the brilliant touches of Kasdan’s screenplay is the way he makes Ned Racine think he is the initiator of Matty Walker’s plans.
Few movies have done a better job of evoking the weather. Heat, body heat, is a convention of pornography, where performers routinely complain about how warm they are (as if lovemaking could cool them off, instead of making them hotter). Although air conditioning was not unknown in south Florida in 1981, the characters here are constantly in heat; there is a scene where Ned comes home, takes off his shirt, and stands in front of the open refrigerator. The film opens with an inn burning in the distance (“Somebody’s torched it to clear the lot,” Ned says. “Probably one of my clients.”) There are other fires. There is the use of the color red. There is the sense that heat inflames passion and encourages madness.
In this heat, Matty seems cool. Early in the film there is a justly famous scene where Matty brings Ned home from a bar, allegedly to listen to her wind chimes, and then asks him to leave. He leaves, then returns, and looks through a window next to her front door. She stands inside, dressed in red, calmly returning his gaze. He picks up a chair and throws it through the window, and in the next shot they are embracing. Knowing what we know about Matty, look once again at her expression as she looks back at him. She looks as confident and absorbed as a child who has pushed a button and is waiting for a video game to respond.
Kasdan, born in 1949, worked in ad agencies before moving to Hollywood to write screenplays. His more personal work languished in desk drawers while his first credits were two of the biggest blockbusters of all time, The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark. George Lucas acted as executive producer on this directorial debut to reassure Warner Bros. that it would come in on time and be releasable. It was; David Chute wrote in Film Comment that it was “perhaps the most stunning debut movie ever” (which raises the question of Citizen Kane, but never mind). Kasdan’s subsequent career has alternated between action pieces written for others (Return of the Jedi, aspects of The Bodyguard) and quirky, smart films directed by himself (The Accidental Tourist, I Love You to Death, and the brilliant, overlooked Grand Canyon in 1991).
In Body Heat, Kasdan’s original screenplay surrounds the characters with good, well-written performances in supporting roles; he creates a real world of police stations, diners, law offices, and restaurants, away from which Matty has seduced Ned into her own twisted scenario. The best supporting work in the movie is by Mickey Rourke, in his breakthrough role, as Ned’s friend, a professional arsonist. Richard Crenna is Matty’s husband. “He’s small, and mean, and weak,” she tells Ned, but when we see him he is not small or weak. Ted Danson and J. A. Preston are a DA and a cop, Ned’s friends, who are drawn reluctantly into suspecting him of murder (Danson’s sense of timing and nuance are perfect in a night scene where he essentially briefs his friend Ned on the case against him).