You can take your Indemnity and Double it...

Please note that this week's film has been rated  18  in the UK.

Funny thing about "Dark Cinema". It doesn't stay dark forever.

Film Noir was the result of a specific set of elements that happened to coalesce in the post-war years: the influx of European film-makers trying to adjust to the American system; the highly restrictive Hollywood production codes; the appetite of a war-weary audience for complex stories with a little meat, etc. etc. If you pull too hard on any one of those threads, the whole "noir" tapestry can unravel, and that's more or less what happened as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s.

Time passed. Society changed. The Government began cracking down on "subversive" elements in the film industry, the Baby Boom led to a drastically different movie-going demographic, and there was an explicit push to undo many of the social freedoms that women had enjoyed during the war years. (Remember all those juicy femmes fatale of the 1940s? Not so much in the 50s...)

In Doris Day movies, this is called Comedy. Elsewhere, it's called Rape.

By the time The Big Combo was released in 1955, its overt "noir" style was considered old-fashioned enough to evince open derision from the reviewers of the age (the New York Times critic dismissed it as a "sputtering, misguided antique").

So yes. The sympathetic criminals of the 40s gave way to the righteous but brutal cops of the 50s. The classy and self-possessed femmes fatale were upstaged by the happy home-makers and bimbo sex objects of the Doris Day/Marilyn Monroe era. The dark shadows of noir cinematography were washed away by the bright lights of CinemaScope and VistaVision and (natch) Stereophonic Sound. 

Film (and the human race) moved on.

But here's the thing: future film-makers go to the movies as well.

Those darkened movie theatres were full of impressionable youngsters who sat there eating their popcorn as they watched Barbara Stanwyck shoot Fred MacMurray. They looked on wide-eyed as Burt Lancaster fell hard for Ava Gardner, and their lives changed as they saw Lizabeth Scott murder, well, everybody.

The Legion of Decency was convinced that kids would see these films and grow up to be juvenile delinquents. Nerts to that.

Kids saw these films and fell in love with films. And decades later, as adults, some of them got a chance to make a few films of their own.

Lawrence Kasdan was one of those kids. He was born in 1949 (five years after Double Indemnity was released in cinemas) and describes movie-going as one of the happiest memories of his childhood.

Decades later, as an adult, he was hired to write the screenplays for a pair of moderately successful films: Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back (you may have heard of them). Those films gave him the clout he needed to begin making the kinds of films that he wanted to make, and he launched his directorial career with something that looks an awful lot like a classic film noir.

Body Heat was released in 1981 and tells the story of a mediocre South Florida lawyer who begins a torrid affair with a glamorous (and very sexy) married woman. Together they decide to murder her husband so they can be together properly (with all the money, of course) although the lawyer gradually realises that all was not quite what he had assumed it to be.

Sound familiar much?

To be clear, Body Heat is not a remake of Double Indemnity, and it is not a "pastiche" noir. There is no way a film like this could have been made in the 1940s (not in Hollywood, at least) and Kasdan makes no attempt to emulate the classic "look" of a noir (almost no attempt).

Much had changed between the 1940s and the 1980s, on so many fronts. The Hollywood "studio system" had collapsed. The Hays Office had disbanded, to be replaced by a "rating" system (still in use today). Civil Rights laws had been passed; iconic public figures had been assassinated, wars had come (and gone). There was a women's rights movement, and a backlash to the women's rights movement. There was a nuclear crisis, a space program and an oil crisis (not necessarily in that order).

All of this is to say that the mindset of movie audiences in 1981 was very different from that of audiences in 1944, even though some of the same people would certainly have been sitting in the theatres (Billy Wilder released his final film the same year Body Heat was released).

The most obvious change in the intervening decades is of course the fallout from the sexual revolution. Attitudes towards sex by 1981 allowed Body Heat to say much of noir's "silent" parts out loud (although the sex scenes aren't nearly as graphic as everyone thought they were at the time). 

And of course sexual morality was not the only attitude that had shifted by the 1980s. 

I have said before that a central characteristic of classic "noir" is the grand Tragedy of the inherently doomed protagonist. Audiences of the 1980s had lived through the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis and The Exorcist. It's safe to say that ideas about Crime and Punishment had... evolved somewhat over the years, and this was to have a profound effect on the way stories could be told.

All of this is to say that Body Heat is a film that feels at once shockingly new and surprisingly familiar. It's the very impressive debut of a talented young director who had grown up watching (and loving) an earlier generation of films, but who was unambiguously a film-maker of a new generation. (Body Heat also launched the careers of William Hurt and Kathleen Turner, by the way.)

This is not noir in a literal sense, and it isn't especially trying to be. But it is what noir looked like after several tumultuous decades of demographic shifts, evolving attitudes and general history.

The term "neo-noir" is used a little too casually in my opinion, but Body Heat is the pugnacious grand-child of noir. Younger, meaner, less constrained, and bursting with barely contained hormones, it still belongs unambiguously to a very distinguished lineage.

We will screen Body Heat at 7.30 on Thursday, the 3rd of July at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

Once again, please note that Body Heat has been rated  18  in the UK (although it would more likely be a  15  were it being classified in 2025).