FAQ

On a sweltering evening in Miranda Beach, Florida, small time attorney Ned Racine (William Hurt) runs into the luscious Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) at an open air concert. He runs into her again at the Pinehaven Tavern. Matty invites him to her house to see her wind chimes, and they begin a torrid affair. Matty convinces Ned that the only thing standing between them is her wealthy husband, shady businessman Edmund Walker (Richard Crenna) and the fact that she has signed a pre-nup and his will leaves everything to his niece, Heather (Carola McGuinness). Ned agrees to murder Edmund so that he and Matty can be together. Unknown to Ned, Matty has her own plan.

The screenplay for Body Heat was written by American film director Lawrence Kasdan, who was inspired by the film Assurance sur la mort (1944).

Yes, the script can be downloaded here.

Matty explains that she got into drugs, i.e., speed and tht she "did things worse than you can imagine." Eventually, she was helped to get clean by a lawyer, who put her to work in his office, which is where she learned a lot about wills and other legal things.

The specifics of what was changed in the new will are not revealed in the film other than that it concerned the bequest to Heather and that it violated the rule against perpetuities, which, as the lawyer from Miami explains, forbids an inheritance to be passed down indefinitely for generations. In the state of Florida, he goes on, if a person dies with no surviving children or parents, then the spouse (Matty) inherits everything.

The bomb that Teddy Lewis (Mickey Rourke) made for her had a delay on it, as he explains to Ned, giving Matty enough time to activate the bomb by opening the door to the boathouse and then quickly dive in the water and swim away.

Ned attempts to retrieve Edmund's glasses from the boathouse but notices the trip wire attached to the door. When Matty arrives, he confronts her and suggests that she retrieve the glasses herself. Matty hesitates but eventually heads toward the boathouse, assuring Ned that she does love him. At the last minute, Ned rushes toward the boathouse to stop Matty, but it suddenly explodes. Ned is arrested, and Matty's body is retrieved from the boathouse, verified by her dental records. From his prison cell, Ned writes to Matty's high school in Illinois and asks to see the yearbook from 1968, the year she graduated. When it arrives, he looks up the photos of Matty Tyler and Mary Ann Simpson and discovers, as he suspected, that the woman he knows as Matty Tyler Walker is really Mary Ann Simpson and vice versa. Her goal is 'to be rich and live in an exotic land.' In the final scene, she is shown seated in a chair on a tropical beach in Brazil, apparently thinking pensively. A young man lying next to her comments that it is hot. She replies, 'Yes,' and puts on her sunglasses.