Save for a few tweaks here and there – Ned is a lawyer instead of a salesman, the rich husband is targeted for his will instead of a life insurance clause – Body Heat follows the Double Indemnity template closely, including Kasdan’s surprisingly excellent attempt to mimic Billy Wilder’s double entendre-filled banter. The love scenes in the film would seem comically ludicrous if Kasdan’s actors weren’t so committed to taking their chemistry to wild extremes. It was also the rare attempt, along with Richard Gere in American Gigolo the year before, to make men into explicit on-screen sex symbols, even though Body Heat is more vividly remembered for Turner’s buttoned-down white blouses and unbridled aggression as a pleasure-seeker.

Now 40 years later still, Body Heat feels uncannily suited to update noir for the 80s, with its emphasis on insatiable greed and vanity, and an adults-only steaminess that carried over into later thrillers like The Bedroom Window, Angel Heart, Fatal Attraction and Sea of Love. We would see the Fred MacMurray character naked, and he would not look at all like Fred MacMurray. Sex would not be the ellipses between when MacMurray watches Stanwyck descending the stairs and when they carry out a scheme to kill her husband for the insurance money. And those first two scenes with Hurt suggest a large part of the answer: not only will the sex be explicit, but men can be objects of desire, too, equal partners in the collaborative arts of crime and lovemaking. Nearly 40 years after Barbara Stanwyck established herself in Fred MacMurray’s ho-hum insurance man in the noir classic Double Indemnity, writer-director Lawrence Kasdan was looking for ways to modernize the genre without losing its essential cynicism, duplicity and ripe stylization. “I like that in a man.” She’s found her mark. Not long after Ned meets Matty Walker, a sultry femme fatale played by Kathleen Turner, she sums him up succinctly: “You’re not too smart,” she says.

Next time Ned appears before his court, the judge hopes he “has either a better defense or a better class of client”. The judge has summoned his Ned Racine to the bench along with his opposing counsel (and buddy) Peter (Ted Danson), and wants to make his disrespect for Ned absolutely clear before offering him an opportunity to take a generous plea bargain. The next time we see William Hurt in Body Heat, he’s working his day job as a lawyer and doing it poorly.

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