One of the consequences of a blockbuster driven Hollywood with its need for scale and large budgets, is that modern mainstream films now rarely have sex and nude scenes. There is now probably far more sex and nudity in television shows which seems kind of strange. This one is an erotic thriller back from when this wasn’t the case, added to my list because it is considered one of the best of its genre. Unfortunately while it has some steamy scenes, it is actually overall kind of tame in terms of sex and makes up for it by being an excellent thriller.

As a heatwave washes across Florida where lawyer Ned Racine works, he is attracted to a beautiful woman Matty Walker who shows up around town. Despite knowing that she is married to a rich businessman, Edmund, with criminal connections, Ned pursues her aggressively and they have an intense affair. Matty insists on secrecy but the two meet and have sex so often that they are seen together by others. When Matty claims that she hates Edmund but can’t leave him because their prenuptial agreement would leave her with nothing and after Ned happens to meet Matty with Edmund together at a local restaurant, Ned hatches a plan to murder him. He obtains an incendiary device from a former client that he helped keep out of prison and enacts a plan to kill Edmund and carry the corpse to a building that the man owns that he then sets on fire, to imply that he was killed by his criminal associates. But while Ned tries to be clever and careful, Matty’s greed puts his plan in jeopardy and he comes to suspect that her schemes run a lot deeper than he thought.

It’s funny how we’ve just watched The Lady Eve recently by sheer coincidence, in which the woman is clearly in charge from the beginning to the end. Here I suppose we see the next step of Hollywood’s evolution of the character: Ned spends the entire film thinking that he is the one in charge, from pursuing a reluctant Matty to proposing that they kill her husband, only to realize in the end that he has been played and she had everything planned out way in advance. The pacing is a little uneven in this regard as most of it plays out as a slow erotic film with Matty and Ned playing a sexually-charged game with intense love-making and copious sweat but then all of the revelations fall out in a rush towards the final quarter or so. I found the film to be tamer than expected and needed as the story establishes Matty as being sexually very voracious and demanding once Ned gets her past her initial, feigned reluctance. The sex here is mostly off-camera and Matty’s sexual appetites are mentioned as part of the dialogue but it would have been far more effective to show it explicitly through sex scenes. This is the rare case of a film which actually needs more sex to better tell the story it wants to tell.

Also pretty great in this are the supporting characters of Peter, a prosecutor, and Oscar, a police detective, both of whom consider themselves good friends of Ned. Ted Danson as Peter manages to be memorable in just this small role and though he looks so very young here, my wife noted how his dancing antics are still similar in The Good Place. Pretty much everyone around Ned warn him that Matty is bad news but he is just too much in lust to take notice. The friends act as sanity checks and it is amazing how Kathleen Turner playing Matty can convincingly and earnestly declare how much she loves Ned when he just knows that she is lying. Overall this is a pretty simple film but it stands out due to how well it is put together and the excellent performances of all of the actors. It is also a very 1980s film down to the musical score and the color tone and thus serves as an excellent example of the typical erotic thriller of that period.