Her husband, Matty says, is not only rich, he's very rich, though what he does is not clear even to her. When, not by chance, they meet a second time, Matty allows him to follow her home, which is not your usual jerry-built condo but a big, pre-Depression, Florida mansion, vaguely Spanish in style and surrounded by enough real estate for a couple of retirement communities. Just as he thinks he's making out famously, Matty disappears. ''I like him even better,'' says Ned, ever-ready with the tired quip. ''He's away most of the time,'' says Matty. She tells him that she is married but that her husband is away. At their first meeting she seems to be laughing at him. She has the taste to buy her clothes at places like Bendel's, a gift for remaining unsurprised by any sort of vulgarism and the wit to be always one step ahead of Ned when he comes on to her with lines that catch cocktail waitresses.
Matty represents the kind of woman Ned has never met before. The opening scene of ''Body Heat'': the camera looks across a pitch-black night landscape to the billowing flames of an abandoned old hotel, burning fiercely some miles away, then pulls back to find Ned Racine (William Hurt), half-naked and sweating, as he stands at his window idly watching the fire while, behind him, a happily chattering young woman is putting on a uniform that seems to have been modelled on those worn by Playboy bunnies. Kasdan's world of amoral second-raters, where the only sin is to be nabbed by the cops. ''Body Heat'' is a hard-breathing, sexy, old-fashioned morality tale, which evolves into a mystery story with a couple of twists that are only matched by the last four or five minutes of Billy Wilder's screen version of Agatha Christie's ''Witness for the Prosecution.'' That, however, is the only similarity between Dame Agatha's gentle world of wrongdoing and Mr. ''True Confessions'' is an introverted movie, a meditation not upon crime but upon its farreaching implications within the community, which happens to be Southern California. One of the few American films of comparable quality this year is Ulu Grosbard's ''True Confessions,'' based on a screenplay by John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, but though both films are about misbehavior of an unkind and unusual variety, they are very different sorts of commercial entertainments. Before he directed ''The Graduate,'' Mike Nichols had more or less tailor-made the screen-version of ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' Martin Scorsese's ''Mean Streets'' followed ''Who's That Knocking at My Door'' and ''Box-Car Bertha.'' Francis Coppola had made a number of films of all kinds before he hit the jackpot with ''The Godfather,'' and Robert Benton had directed two very fine though virtually unrecognized films before the public took notice of his ''Kramer vs.
Most directors work up to their first major hits, those films that establish them as directors of particular, one-of-a-kind talents.
Kasdan's original screenplay, nor for his remarkable treatment of it as its director. Nothing I'd heard about it in the interim had quite prepared me for the vitality of Mr. ''Body Heat'' is about a number of things that don't work, including air-conditioners, and no one seeming to understand why.īecause ''Body Heat'' opened here in late August, during the vacation period, I've just now caught up with it. I can't remember a film debut to equal it, that is, when a director has made a first film as fully and intelligently realized as ''Body Heat.'' Here is an inspiriting tale of contemporary adultery and murder set somewhere north of Miami, in a small, dull coastal town, in a Florida that has not yet been efficiently air-conditioned from one coast to the other. With ''Body Heat,'' the steamiest, most thoroughly satisfying melodrama about love, lust and greed to be seen since Billy Wilder's ''Double Indemnity'' and Tay Garnett's ''The Postman Always Rings Twice'' (forget about this year's lethargic remake), Lawrence Kasdan, heretofore known as a screenwriter (''Raiders of the Lost Ark,'' ''Continental Divide''), suddenly emerges as a member of the American directing elite.