It's a hot summer. Ned Racine is waiting for something special to happen. And when it does... He won't be ready for the consequences.
In the midst of a searing Florida heat wave, a woman convinces her lover, a small-town lawyer, to murder her rich husband.
Femmes Fatales, Perfect Crime, Dangerous Attraction, Treacherous Spouses
Atmospheric, Disturbing, Ominous, Sexy, Tense, Cynical
During a particularly intense Florida heatwave, Ned Racine (William Hurt), an inept and somewhat sleazy lawyer, begins an affair with Matty (Kathleen Turner), wife of Edmund Walker (Richard Crenna), a wealthy businessman.
They go to great lengths to keep their affair a secret, but Ned mistakenly makes a pass at a woman he thought was Matty but turns out to be an old school friend of hers named Mary Ann Simpson (Kim Zimmer); and Matty is discovered performing fellatio on Ned by Edmund's young niece Heather (Carola McGuinness) who is staying with Matty. Ned even meets Edmund when he comes across the Walkers by chance.
Matty soon makes it clear to Ned that she wants to leave Edmund but also wants his money, explaining that a divorce would leave her with very little of his fortune because of a prenuptial agreement. Racine suggests that the only option is to kill Edmund.
While planning the murder, Ned consults one of his shadier clients, Teddy Lewis (Mickey Rourke), an expert on incendiary devices, who gives Ned the bomb he built for him.
Matty tries to get Ned to change Edmund's will to prevent her niece Heather from getting half the fortune, but he refuses in order to avoid suspicious activity in the days leading up to Edmund's death.
Racine establishes an alibi at a Miami hotel, then drives back to the Walker estate at night where he kills Edmund. He places the body in an abandoned business that Edmund was known to be involved with, and destroys the building with the incendiary device, to make it look like a botched arson job.
After his victim's death has been officially declared, Ned is contacted by Edmund's lawyer about a new will that Racine supposedly drew up on Edmund's behalf which was witnessed by Matty's friend Mary Ann Simpson. Unaware of the new will's existence, Ned plays along to avoid suspicion. Still leaving half the estate to Heather, the new will is so badly prepared it is declared null and void, due to a violation of the rule against perpetuities, resulting in Matty getting the entire fortune.
As Matty later admits to an angered Ned that she forged the will, Ned's friends, prosecutor Peter Lowenstein (Ted Danson) and police Detective Oscar Grace (J.A. Preston), begin to suspect Ned of involvement with Matty in a plot to kill her husband. While Ned is in Grace's office, Edmund's sister Roz brings in her daughter Heather to identify the man she saw earlier with Aunt Matty. Heather meets Ned face-to-face but fails to recognize him.
No longer concealing his affair with Matty, Ned tells Grace and Lowenstein it has only recently begun. They reveal to him that Edmund's steel-rim glasses, which he always wore, were not on him at the time of the explosion, and are nowhere to be found. Mary Ann Simpson has also disappeared, having supposedly left the country after witnessing the new will that Matty forged.
Nervous about the will, the glasses, the suspicions of the police, and Matty's loyalty, Ned happens upon a lawyer who once sued him over a mishandled legal case who reveals that to make amends, he recommended Ned to Matty Walker, and admits to telling her about his lack of competence as a lawyer.
Lowenstein warns Ned that someone kept calling his hotel room on the night in question but never got an answer, thereby weakening his alibi. While in custody on a separate charge, Teddy Lewis also warns Ned that a woman came to him for another incendiary device, and that he showed her how to set it to explode when opening a door.
Matty calls Ned to tell him the glasses were found by her housekeeper who, in exchange for money, has left them in the boathouse on the Walker estate. At her prompting, a suspicious Ned goes to the boathouse late at night and sees through the window a long twiste
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