A real film noir for the Eighties. Writer-director Lawrence Kasdan has fired the ashes of Double Indemnity and fashioned a new wife-and-lover-plot-to-kill-husband story that has only that basic situation in common with its carnal forefather.

The twists and double twists that follow the actual murder are ingenious in the extreme.

As the lovers, William Hurt and Kathleen Turner genuinely capture the idea of an overriding passion that outstrips all other moral considerations.

Hurt, with his bruised, laconic voice, and Turner, here an updated Lauren Bacall with a slinky look from under the eyelids, became hot Hollywood properties for a while following these performances.

At the back of it all is the motif of heat: a fire, a fryer in a cafe and, of course, the weather and the love/lust affair. The dialogue between Hurt and Turner is terse, loaded and beautifully delivered by the stars.

As for the director, he's made the kind of film where nothing is superfluous and the clue to the denouement might pass by in a trice under your very nose.

John Barry's music evokes the scores of the Forties without aping them and is a great aid to the impact of the drama.