Richard H. Kline Body Heat (1981)
Richard H. Kline, ASC (November 15, 1926 – August 7, 2018) was the cinematographer of Body Heat (1981). By the time he shot Kasdan's debut he was a 25-year ASC veteran with two Academy Award nominations (Camelot, 1967; King Kong, 1976) and an extensive studio résumé.
Kline was a working studio cinematographer
Kline grew up in Los Angeles, the son of cinematographer Benjamin H. Kline. He worked his way up through the ASC ranks — operator on King Solomon's Mines (1950) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), camera assistant in the late 1940s — and graduated to director of photography in the mid-1960s. By 1981 his credits included Camelot (1967, Oscar nom), The Boston Strangler (1968), Soylent Green (1973), The Terminal Man (1974), King Kong (1976, Oscar nom), The Fury (1978), The Champ (1979), and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). (wikipedia)
He had not shot a noir.
Kasdan wanted heat to register on screen as moral atmosphere
The job Lawrence Kasdan (in Body Heat) gave Kline was unusual: make the heat the film's moral weather. The 1944 Double Indemnity and the 1946 The Postman Always Rings Twice — Kasdan's two acknowledged models — had been forced by the production code to imply heat through wardrobe and behavior. Kasdan wanted the heat to be visible as light, sweat, and depth-of-field choices, not just suggested through dialogue.
Kline approached it as a problem in opposing lighting strategies:
- Daytime exteriors: bright, high-contrast, with the highlights kept just under the limit so the picture would feel hot without blowing out. Kline used neutral-density gels and stopped down rather than pulling exposure back, which kept the textures of skin and fabric visible.
- Nighttime interiors: soft, lamp-and-window-lit, often with a single source motivated by a streetlight or a bedside lamp. The Pinehaven bedroom scenes are lit almost entirely from below or from a side window, with the rest of the room going to deep shadow.
- The bandshell sequence: practical Tivoli-style bulbs and stage spill, with Kline's HMI fill kept minimal. The image looks lit by the bandshell, not lit by the production.
"I wanted a high-contrast picture. Not the soft-focused, gauzy thing some thrillers were doing then. Larry wanted the audience to feel the sweat. You can only do that with depth and shadow." — Richard H. Kline, American Cinematographer (memorial profile, 2018) (paraphrase)
What the film looks like
What Kline delivered is a picture in which sweat reads on every face for the entire runtime. Roger Ebert noticed the discipline of the lighting:
"The look of the film, by Richard Kline, is hot and humid throughout. The actors all glisten. The interiors are dim, with light coming from outside through windows or from inside through table lamps. It is one of the most carefully visualized films of the early 1980s." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com (Great Movies, 2002)
The cinematography did not earn an Academy Award nomination — 1981 was a stacked year, with Reds, Excalibur, Ragtime, and On Golden Pond taking the slots — but Kline's Body Heat work has been steadily rediscovered. American Cinematographer named it one of the defining looks of the 1980s in a 2018 obituary.
Kline's career after Body Heat
Kline continued to work at the top of the studio system through the 1980s, with The Man With Two Brains (1983), All of Me (1984), and My Stepmother is an Alien (1988), among others. He retired in the mid-1990s and was given the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999.
| Year | Film | Director |
|---|---|---|
| 1967 | Camelot | Joshua Logan — Oscar nom |
| 1968 | The Boston Strangler | Richard Fleischer |
| 1973 | Soylent Green | Richard Fleischer |
| 1976 | King Kong | John Guillermin — Oscar nom |
| 1978 | The Fury | Brian De Palma |
| 1979 | Star Trek: The Motion Picture | Robert Wise |
| 1981 | Body Heat | Lawrence Kasdan |
| 1983 | The Man With Two Brains | Carl Reiner |
| 1984 | All of Me | Carl Reiner |
| 1988 | My Stepmother is an Alien | Richard Benjamin |