There's not even enough wind to stir the chimes that festoon the porch off Turner's bedroom - can't the rich old cuckold spring for air conditioning? Hurt and Turner are reduced to emptying the refrigerator's ice tray into the post-coital bath they share - but Hurt's left twisting nonetheless, in one of the better updates of this ageless tale. Of course, Body Heat is a latter-day version of the story for which Double Indemnity serves as archetype: Duplicitous woman seduces lust-addled stud into killing rich older husband, then leaves him to twist slowly, slowly in the wind. Soon, the pillow talk works around to murder. After the ritual game of cat-and-mouse, Turner and Hurt kindle a torrid romance, despite the enervating heat that keeps everything else limp as dishrags. Then he meets up with Kathleen Turner, who hangs around cocktail lounges when her wheeler-dealer husband (Richard Crenna) is out of town, which is a lot. The rest of his time he spends lazily with bourbon or beer or in bed with whoever obliges him. It's a town where William Hurt, a lawyer who's neither very bright nor very scrupulous, ekes out a modest existence that seems to suit him he can dine at the best restaurant in town once a month so long as he doesn't order an appetizer. A sweltering spell of weather settles down for a long roost, and the distant glow of an old hotel a relic of the peninsula's past as an exotic getaway for northerners with money lights the opening scene it's been torched for the insurance, an occurrence so common as to warrant little comment. The coastal Florida town in Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat brings to mind remote colonial outposts in movies like The Letter (nearby Miami, here, seems as far away as London).
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