Body Heat (1981) Body Heat (1981)

See also: _Index | Plot Structure (Body Heat) | Backbeats (Body Heat)

Quick Facts

  • Director: Lawrence Kasdan (directorial debut)
  • Screenplay: Lawrence Kasdan
  • Starring: William Hurt (Ned Racine), Kathleen Turner (Matty Walker, in her film debut), Richard Crenna (Edmund Walker), Ted Danson (Peter Lowenstein), J.A. Preston (Det. Oscar Grace), Mickey Rourke (Teddy Lewis)
  • Cinematography: Richard H. Kline
  • Editor: Carol Littleton
  • Music: John Barry
  • Runtime: 113 minutes
  • Release Date: August 28, 1981 (US)
  • MPAA Rating: R
  • Distributor: The Ladd Company / Warner Bros.
  • IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082089/

Overview

A second-rate small-town Florida lawyer is drawn, during a brutal South Florida heat wave, into a sexual affair with a wealthy man's wife and into a plan to kill the husband and inherit the estate. Lawrence Kasdan's directorial debut is a deliberate neo-noir homage to Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice — the heat is the moral atmosphere as well as the literal weather, and Ned Racine's confidence in his own competence is the exact lever the film uses to dismantle him. Kathleen Turner, in her debut, plays Matty Walker as a woman whose every word might be either the truth or its perfect counterfeit; the climactic boathouse explosion and the final reveal that Matty is alive in the tropics — and that the body in the boathouse was Mary Ann Simpson, the childhood friend who had discovered Matty impersonating their dead schoolmate Matty Tyler1 — make the film one of the cleanest worse-tools-sufficient noirs of the period.

  1. NEEDS DELETION — flagged by /cite-to-backbeats on 2026-05-09. The original overview said the body in the boathouse was "Mary Ann, a childhood friend whose identity Matty has spent years preparing to assume." Per Backbeats b41, the impersonator had been using Matty Tyler's identity (their dead Wheaton schoolmate), not Mary Ann's. Mary Ann was the friend who later discovered the impersonation and was extracting payments. I have rewritten the clause in place to match b41; the owner may wish to verify the rewrite. ↩