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.
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