Torrid Movie, Hot New Star

By RICHARD CORLISS

BODY HEAT Directed and Written by Lawrence Kasdan

It is 1946; it is 1981. Overhead fans languidly attempt to rearrange the air. Late afternoon heat seeps through the Venetian blinds. A tenor sax investigates the upper registers of despair. Ned Racine (William Hurt) drags voraciously on a nonstop series of cigarettes. He wears a Clark Gable mustache and a Zachary Scott hat. And one night, as a Dorsey-style orchestra plays That Old Feeling, a sleek, tanned woman in white emerges from the darkness of the band shell and into the rest of Ned's life.

Body Heat--wonderful title--bears a family resemblance in plot and tone to James M. Cain's Double Indemnity: a man more ordinary than he thinks he is meets a newly rich femme fatale; sparks fly, plots hatch, a husband dies, insurance claims are debated, friendships fray, the lovers quarrel and part explosively. And though Lawrence Kasdan's film is set in today's South Florida, its characters move through an atmosphere that suggests the confluences of decor and demeanor in a 1940s film noir.

"You're not too smart," Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) tells Ned at their first meeting. "I like that in a man." She does indeed; Matty is too smart for both of them. A detective friend of Ned's describes her as "one quick, smart broad" whose special gift is relentlessness. At the outset, Matty is trapped in comfortable domesticity, married to a wealthy land speculator (Richard Crenna) 20 years older than she. But her ambition is "to be rich and live in an exotic land." The insurance money that would be hers with her husband's death represents air fare to that dream world. And Ned--lousy lawyer, good pal, nice-guy stud--may prove to be her passport.

As the only female principal in a cast of shysters, cops and crooks--and as the agent of their anxiety--Matty might seem one more example of moviemaker misogyny hiding behind the imperatives of the thriller genre. She surely is a metaphor for the seductive, destructive power of ambition. But she is also the one figure of reckless imagination. Smoothly and confidently, she guides the taut mechanism of the movie's plot. She creates between herself and Ned a sexual attraction that erases the past and suggests terrible new options. And she knows, as a young woman whose Midwestern memories are as sordid as her Palm Beach present is posh, that she must sweat for what she wants. The film and the other characters sweat with her. Perspiration stains the satin sheets as Ned and Matty make love; and after, there is dew on the down of her back as she caresses and coaxes him. She is the mistress of these ceremonies, leading Ned on by his lust toward acts of love and murder.

The sex scenes in Body Heat are humid and tumid enough, but they are there to serve the symmetry of Kasdan's visual and narrative design. "Ned is caught in limbo, in a dream," Kasdan, 32, told TIME. "I wanted this film to have the intricate structure of a dream, the density of a good novel, and the texture of recognizable people in extraordinary circumstances." In his first film as writer-director (he was the co-author of The Empire Strikes Back and wrote the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark), Kasdan has succeeded handsomely. There is intricacy in the movements of his prowling camera, in the pairing of shots and situations from different parts of the film, in the gradual muting of the film's colors from flaming orange to blacks and whites as the lovers' passion turns to calculation. There is density in the plot construction, a maze that Ned must negotiate to save his life; Body Heat has more narrative drive, character congestion and sense of place than any original screenplay since Chinatown; yet it leaves room for some splendid young actors to breathe, to collaborate 5 in creating the film's texture.

I "I see an enormous logjam of talented actors out there," Kasdan says, "and precious few of them have good parts to chew on." Body Heat is full of meaty characters and pungent performances--Ted Danson as a tap-dancing prosecutor, J.A. Preston as a dogged detective, and especially Mickey Rourke as a savvy young ex-con who looks and acts as if he could be Ned's sleazier twin brother. Kathleen Turner's Matty mixes come-hither looks with a sultry, baritone voice. This is a creature of fire and ice, with no intermediate shadings of warmth or aloofness. Thanks largely to her presence, Body Heat is a film to be seen at a drive-in, on a heavy summer night, with someone you trust.

At the center of the film--as he was in Altered States and Eyewitness--is William Hurt. Here again he plays the bright, likable guy who follows an obsession and takes the moviegoer along on the trip; he is both anchor and sail. For an actor trained to stage work, Hurt has remarkable economy of gesture. He acts with his eyes and his voice: under pressure, his head snaps into a stare that means to burn into the viewer's skull, and his voice exhales intellectual urgency, as if a dangerous possibility had just slapped him on the back. He seems at once charmingly reasonable and wildly driven--a watcher and a leader. This is what distinguishes Hurt from explosive actors like Richard Dreyfuss and Al Pacino: where they are forever displaying their most manic emotions, he keeps something secret, in reserve. But the careers of Garbo, De Niro and Mitchum indicate that audiences never tire of trying to fathom those mysteries. Body Heat offers the best chance yet to study this electrifying enigma. "He's totally focused, assured, authoritative," says Larry Kasdan, "and his range astounds me. His power is both raw and refined." Marshall W. Mason, his director at Manhattan's Circle Repertory Company, praises his "generosity and anger, his sensitivity and scathing sense of humor--all this and lots of sexual heat." Adds Steve Tesich, who wrote Eyewitness: "His future is limited only by his ambition. If he wants to join the two or three male superstars, it's there for him to achieve." Sally Kellerman, as a cynical singer in PBS's Verna USO Girl, put it more directly when she first laid eyes on William Hurt: "Now that's what I call a gorgeous hunk of man."

Hurt, 31, doesn't read reviews, but he has heard this said about him before --in 1977 when he appeared in Corinne Jacker's My Life at Circle Rep as a young physicist "swimming in memories" (Christopher Reeve played his grandfather), and in 1980 after his theatrical film debut as a young scientist swimming toward his primal past in Altered States. He heard it when he played Hamlet and originated the Kenneth Talley Jr. role in The Fifth of July at Circle Rep; he will surely hear it again when Body Heat opens next week. The verdict is in, the course is set: this blond, hunky six-footer will be the Wasp movie idol of the '80s.

Just now, though, as he prowls in blue Med Corps shirt and faded jeans through the Manhattan apartment he shares with New York City Ballet Dancer Sandra Jennings, Hurt sounds more like the theology student he was at Tufts University in the late '60s. "We were never meant to understand," he says with Byronic intensity. "We don't cause events, and we certainly can't hope to control them. But we can be amazed by them, and enjoy our amazement. That's what theater is --and, I think, film can be--a compact made between the artists and the audience to witness and to sing."

The searching man was a wandering boy. He spent his early childhood in the South Pacific, where his father was director of trust territories for the State Department. Bill attended Eastern prep schools, spent his senior year of college in England, then traveled to Australia and worked on a sheep farm. "I assisted in the birth of many sheep--they're really dumb animals, they'd come out feet first. But I found that doing what you want to do--and for me, for now, it's acting--is like those sheep giving birth: it's pulling your past up with love and pain. I've found something that I love doing, and the pain goes with it, and the pain is worth it. It says: 'See how good this feels? You ain't felt nothin' yet. C'mon, let's expose the wounds and see how far you can go.' That's where I want to go."

Hurt, who is divorced from Actress Mary Beth Hurt, rejected several substantial movie roles before making Altered States, and frequently returns "home" to Circle Rep. This summer he spent four weeks alternating the lead role in Romulus Linney's Childe Byron with a bit part in Jim Leonard Jr.'s The Diviners, and next March he is slated to play Richard II -- a perfect role for this intense monarch of metaphors. "When I present a part on the stage, it is to make my life better. When that doesn't happen, I will stop."

Film work seems less central to his concerns and his demands. Asked about his grueling 18 months making Altered States, he replies: "Have you ever been beaten up on the street? Well, working on a film set is easier." But he lavishes praise on Larry Kasdan, who, like Marshall Mason, offers actors that precious directorial commodity: trust. After Altered States, Eyewitness and Body Heat, Hurt may be said to have mastered the craft. But he won't say it. "I respect what people have told me," he says. "If I make it to 40, 1 might be a good actor. With these three films, I think I've finally passed kindergarten in film acting -- with honors, even. Now I want to see what first grade is like." -- By Richard Corliss

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