But his prey sizes him up and quickly observes, “You’re not very smart, are you? I like that in a man.” Racine does not realize how honest she is being until much later. He follows like a fish to a sweetly baited hook, catching up to light her cigarette and to attempt a pick-up. As he watches, a stunning woman in the audience wearing a clingy white dress stands up, turns and slowly walks past him. On a sultry evening he walks past the town band shell, where an orchestra labors in the heat. Hurt is Ned Racine, the small town’s indolent lawyer/Lothario, cavalierly representing his low-rent clients by day and picking up waitresses at night. It also introduced William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Ted Danson and Mickey Rourke in their first significant film roles. The best lawyer–centric noir film I know is a modern take set not on the shadowy mean streets of LA or New York City, but in a nondescript Florida seaside town during a heatwave.īody Heat, from 1981, was director Lawrence Kasdan’s first film. In my view, film noir is an “open software” that is malleable in the hands of writers and directors. There is a long running question among film critics as to whether “film noir” is a genre of film circumscribed by its dark themes or a style of cinema defined by visual markers. And, as events so inevitably collapse around Racine’s ears, the natural recompense for the sordidness of his life, so Kasdan achieves his goal, creating a film to sit proudly in the legacy of those nihilistic standard bearers of the past.During a recent convalescence, a friend sent me a collection of classic American “film noir” movies from the ‘40s to help me pass the time. The film is set during the sweltering prelude to a storm, a heated mirror to their illicit passions. In an inspired creative move, the director takes the basic visual motifs of the genre - turn down the lights and let the shadows fall long - and adds stark humidity.
Kasdan fuses the traditions of old into his contemporary setting with some subtlety - the intricacies of legalese and America’s obsession with real estate are keynotes in the wiring of the set-up. Thus, when they plot the perfect murder, of Richard Crenna’s weasley but loaded husband, you just know something dark and complicated will unfold in the background. He’s just a normal, greedy, lust-driven guy, she’s got things going on. After a night of this kind of passion - and Kasdan revolves his plot around the landmark va-va-voom of their sexual encounter - who wouldn’t get a bit cock-eyed. He’s seedy, an over-aged bachelor priding himself on his womanising skills. It’s not for nothing that Kathleen Turner, who was making her debut, would be the prototype for Jessica Rabbit, she starts every conversation with her body, finishing them off with the razor edge of her tongue: “You’re not too smart, I like that in a man.”Īs with noir’s abiding tenets, William Hurt’s offbeat bottom-dwelling lawyer deserves everything he’s going to get, but, thanks to the actor’s skill in giving him a human strain, we still catch the note of his despair.
Openly intending to reinvent the seething amorality of film noirs heyday in the ‘40s and ‘50s, Lawrence Kasdan gets his two key ingredients dead on: the cold heart of his screenplay and the sheer heat of his leading lady.