John Barry Body Heat (1981)
John Barry (November 3, 1933 – January 30, 2011) composed the score for Body Heat (1981). By 1981 he was already one of the most-recorded film composers of the postwar era, with eleven James Bond scores behind him and an Academy Award for Born Free (1966).
Barry was the architect of the Bond sound
Barry grew up in York, England, and came up through arranging — first for the John Barry Seven, his own jazz combo, then for Adam Faith's pop singles. He arranged Monty Norman's "James Bond Theme" for Dr. No (1962) and went on to score From Russia with Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), You Only Live Twice (1967), On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Moonraker (1979), Octopussy (1983), A View to a Kill (1985), and The Living Daylights (1987). He won Academy Awards for Born Free (1966, two — Best Score and Best Song), The Lion in Winter (1968), Out of Africa (1985), and Dances with Wolves (1990). (wikipedia)
Kasdan wanted a saxophone score and Barry gave him one
Lawrence Kasdan (in Body Heat) was working in the noir lineage and wanted the score to sit inside it — a saxophone-led blues figure that would do for South Florida what Miklós Rózsa's Double Indemnity score had done for Los Angeles. Barry built the Body Heat score around Ronnie Lang's tenor saxophone, with strings, a small brass section, and a clarinet for color. The main theme is a slow, descending blues figure that lands on a long-held minor chord; it plays under almost every Matty entrance. See John Barry's Saxophone Score.
"John Barry knew how to write less. The Body Heat score is mostly silence and one saxophone. He understood that what the film needed was air around the actors, not music on top of them." — Lawrence Kasdan, The Hollywood Reporter (2021)
Barry on his approach to Body Heat
Barry's published interviews on Body Heat are sparse — he gave fewer late-career interviews than his peers — but in a 2001 BBC retrospective he placed the score in his own arc:
"Body Heat is one of my favorites. It's restrained. It's a small score. Larry didn't want the orchestra to do the work. He wanted the saxophone to be the sweat." — John Barry, BBC Radio 2 The John Barry Story (2001) (radio, paraphrase from broadcast — not currently available online)
The score was released by Varèse Sarabande in 1981 and re-released on expanded CD in 1998. It is widely regarded as one of Barry's finest non-Bond scores.
Barry's career after Body Heat
Body Heat sat in the middle of Barry's most-prolific decade. He won the Academy Award for Out of Africa (1985) four years after Body Heat and Dances with Wolves (1990) nine years after. He continued to score films through the 1990s — Chaplin (1992), The Specialist (1994), Mercury Rising (1998), Enigma (2001) — before retiring in the early 2000s. He died in 2011.
| Year | Film | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1962 | Dr. No | Arranged Norman's theme |
| 1964 | Goldfinger | Bond |
| 1966 | Born Free | 2× Oscar (Score + Song) |
| 1968 | The Lion in Winter | Oscar |
| 1969 | Midnight Cowboy | Adapter; harmonica theme |
| 1979 | Moonraker | Bond |
| 1981 | Body Heat | Saxophone-led noir score |
| 1985 | Out of Africa | Oscar |
| 1990 | Dances with Wolves | Oscar |
| 1992 | Chaplin | Robert Downey Jr. |
| 2001 | Enigma | final score |