I remember reading once that when actress Kathleen Turner met Lauren Bacall, Turner introduced herself to Bacall as “the young you.” I don’t know how Bacall reacted to that introduction, but I remember thinking it wasn’t exactly a cool thing to say. Heck, at the time I only knew Bacall by reputation. Now, having seen a few of Bacall’s best works as well as Body Heat, Turner’s film debut, I can see where Turner was coming from in the first place. Oh, I still think Bacall was better, but I can see the comparisons, and Turner, to her credit, seems to have diversified her work a bit more than Bacall was probably permitted to do in her youth due to studio contracts.
All that said, William Hurt, male lead in this movie and a good actor in his own right, is no Humphrey Bogart. For this movie, however, he could be a Fred MacMurray…
In the middle of a heat wave where apparently no one in Miami has air conditioning, lawyer Ned Racine meets the beautiful Matty Walker. Matty is unhappily married to a rich man named Edmund (Richard Crenna), and the two soon begin a steamy love affair, made all the steamier by the heat wave that seems to show every character covered in sweat in every scene no matter what’s going on. Matty hates her older husband, but she can’t divorce him and keep his fortune since she signed a pre-nup. But if he dies, she can inherit half of his vast fortune, the rest going to Edmund’s young niece. So, why not find a way to kill him? It’s Ned’s idea, but Matty has some ideas of her own.
Yeah, there’s some pretty strong parallels here to Double Indemnity, so I really wasn’t too surprised by the outcome here. Hurt’s Ned is a lot less innocent than Fred MacMurray was in the other movie, but what little is said about Barbara Stanwyck’s character in that movie suggests that Turner’s Matty may be a bit worse. What we see of Ned’s other clients suggests he isn’t that picky when it comes to clients, and Mickey Rourke’s arsonist is a nice reminder of that. But somehow, Ned still has a pair of friends in the form of a young Ted Danson as a DA and J.A. Preston’s cop. That actually adds to a nice touch in the movie: even the other characters seem to exist to warn Ned he’s in more trouble than he knows.
All this is a way to say I really dug this movie. I wasn’t expecting to. It looked very predictable in how it would all shake out. Very few of my personal predictions didn’t come true–I suspected that Matty’s friend Mary Ann was going to turn out to be her girlfriend, but not in 1981–and yet I still enjoyed the hell out of the ride. It’s a sign of a good movie that, even when I can see where it’s going, that I can enjoy the ride along the way.
On a final note: Turner does have a very Bacall-esque first appearance, though the Hays Code would have never allowed Bacall to bare as much flesh as Turner does here. Maybe it’s because I am more familiar with her lighter fare, such as her work in Romancing the Stone or just being the voice of Jessica Rabbit, but she does a far better job of evoking the femme fatale of old than Hurt does as the sap who meets her. That’s a testament to Turner and her skills as an actress, but saying she may have been the young Bacall may have been a bit presumptuous in that, really, she was herself, and she proved how good she could be starting here and moving on for the rest of her career.
Grade: A
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