Body Heat: The Trap You Set for Yourself (opens in new tab)

“My history’s burning up out here,” Ned Racine (William Hurt) tells his lover in the opening minutes of Lawrence Kasdan’s directorial debut, Body Heat (1981). Ned, a small-time attorney and local roué in his South Florida beach town, recognizes the building ablaze in the distance as the Seawater Inn, where his family used to eat dinner twenty-five years ago. “Now somebody’s torched it to clear the lot,” he says with a bitter laugh. “Probably one of my clients.” From his words, we understand t...