William Hurt

Body Heat (Deluxe Edition)
$19.98
Body Heat: 9 out of 10: Many successful movies lose their ability to shock over the years. After hundreds of copy cats Alien isn't as effective as when it first came out. Kramer vs. Kramer certainly isn't the shocking eye opener it once was.

Body Heat should suffer the same fate. It doesn't. Despite a hundred direct to video takes on the same story (six of them with the exact same title) the movie still works. In fact it works very well indeed.

Writer Lawrence Kasdan had just penned Raiders of the Lost Ark and Empire Strikes Back so it is a surprise he chooses noir for his first directing outing. (His next film was The Big Chill so this is one guy hard to pigeonhole) He both updates and in many ways upgrades the noir of the past.

By setting the movie in a Podunk Florida town he invokes John D Macdonald the way no Macdonald movie treatment has successfully done. His then unknown actors William Hurt and Kathleen Turner are pitch perfect.

This is a movie that really brings some new things to the table as it does some old things very well indeed. Like the best noir you are too involved to even begin to try to guess the next twist and turn.

Like Scorsese in Goodfellas or Huston in the Maltese Falcon Kasdan's directing is obviously very good yet his tricks remain hidden from view. Not a wasted shot and your television will sweat from all the heat generated.

Highly recommended to all fans of noir or simply fans of movies.

Children of a Lesser God
$14.98
I was very pleased with this purchase. Very fast service, product in excellent condition. I would use this seller again.

Selected Shorts: The William Hurt Collection
$28.00
Recorded live at the Peter Norton Symphony Space in New York City and at venues across the United States, these audio anthologies feature short stories from the Selected Shorts program that airs nationwide. More than 300,000 listeners tune in to this offering weekly to hear some of their favorite tales read aloud by an assortment of distinguished actors. ?From a Bosnian man's struggle to make a new life in America to?a teenage boy's relationship?with his single mother and her new boyfriend against the background of the stark Montana landscape?this collection of poignant, romantic, and funny tales is performed entirely by the Academy Award?winning actor William Hurt. Featured stories include Ron Carlson's "Towel Season," Richard Ford's "Communist," Aleksandar Hemon's "Blind Josef Pronek," and Tobias Wolff's "Nightingale." The CD also includes an interview with William Hurt.

Altered States
$9.98
William Hurt makes a memorable film debut as research scientist Eddie Jessup in this Ken Russell masterpiece. Jessup works with schizophrenics and is constantly amazed by their alleged religious experiences during hypnosis. Hoping to gain first hand experience, Jessup starts experimenting with an isolation tank housed in the basement of a hospital. Closely monitored by his friend and assistant (Bob Balaban) Jessup goes back in time and relives painful memories such as the death of his father and has his own religious experiences. Eddie meets a fellow Ph.D named Emily (Blair Brown) at a party and the two hit it off. Both are intense and inquisitive and they eventually marry and start a family. However, Jessup wants to take his experiments further so he leaves Emily and their two kids so that he can travel to Mexico and take part in a shaman's ceremony. Jessup is given some powerful and unidentified drugs in liquid form and his hallucinations become more dangerous and possibly deadly. When he returns stateside, with the still unidentified drug, he combines his new find with the isolation tank and things turn into a living nightmare for Jessup and those around him. Without revealing any of the horrors that follow, I'll only say that Emily has begun studying primates in their natural habitat and she may not have to go far to study her subjects. Hurt is hypnotic as Jessup making Eddie a dreamer who is determined at all costs to literally go deeper into himself and find out all about man and himself in the process. Brown is quite attractive and is just as intense as Hurt. She does a good job of capturing the pain and fear of a woman who loves her husband but is forced to watch him succumb to his demons and then worry about what he's capable of doing next. The film has amazing visuals, particularly religious imagery. These scenes are both beautiful and frightening at the same time. A well made thriller from Russell based on Paddy Chayefsky's novel. Chayefsky wrote the screenplay, but since he was displeased with Russell's handling of his material he demanded to be credited as Sidney Aaron, his pen name.