"You're not too smart," Kathleen Turner's spider, Matty Walker, tells fly-to-be Ned Racine (William Hurt) on their first meeting. "I like that in a man." Married to a wealthy, older land speculator (Richard Crenna), Matty has other plans for her life, plans which the insurance on her husband's head would just about finance, and which Ned's immediate, obsessive fix on her will just about facilitate. Sound familiar? Body Heat is that rare thing, a remake that works-on its own terms. Double Indemnity with a twist of Postman coming to haunt us from Out of the Past: Body Heat makes no bones about its debt to the forties noir, a genre which it both replicates and caricatures. Hurt's smalltown Florida lawyer is too simple to be either classy or crooked; he's the perfect foil for Turner's displaced midwestern teenager hiding out in a grown woman's groans. The critics along with Ned fell for all that sweat and heavy breathing but the beauty of Turner's first major film performance is the way it presages the cannily tongue-in-cheek passions of Prizzi's Honor and Romancing the Stone; the beauty of William Hurt's Ned that he recognizes his own soft-spoken nothingness; and the beauty of Body Heat that its fatal passions-like those of James M. Cain's victims-are so very personal, enormous only in comparison to the God-forsaken corner in which they were spawned.