France drama
1960
color 118 min.
Director: Rene Clement
CLV: $49.95 - available
1 disc, catalog # CC1476L
Alain Delon gives a jolting star performance in Purple Noon, René Clément's lush 1960 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. He leaves scruples and reticence behind to tear into the central role of a clever, affable sociopath named Tom Ripley. He's been hired to persuade a shipping magnate's son, named Philippe Greenleaf in the movie, to leave an Italian seaside village and go home to the U.S. But Tom finds he'd rather be the identical twin of the heir to a fortune than the agent of his return. The plot is the same in the book and in the movie, but the emotional pitch is more highstrung and the texture gaudier onscreen. Highsmith's Tom is in a state of homosexual denial. Delon's Tom is a flamboyant bisexual. For the first half hour, Tom and Philippe (the urbane, malevolent Maurice Ronet) enact a series of polymorphously perverse, emotionally sadistic games that make the ensuing betrayals and murders seem satisfying and inevitable.
Clément's a shrewd director who's capable of master strokes, like showing Tom develop his forging skills by enlarging Philippe's signature and and projecting it on paper sheets pinned to a wall. But what holds you right up to the not-so-grand finale is Clément's surefooted handling of the plot and the performers‹especially Delon as Tom. Three-and-a-half decades haven't dulled the shock of seeing Tom dressed in his opposite number's clothes, kissing his own image in the mirror and repeating words of love he's heard Phil mouth to his fiancée. Delon is part passion flower, part Venus flytrap, and he has a sort of feral wiliness. Throughout his years of stardom, no actor spun offscreen scandals (such as the 1969 murder of his bodyguard) more cunningly to augment rather than taint his movie image. Even near his career's start, in Purple Noon, he must have sensed he could use Tom Ripley's pretty-boy exoticism as a stepping-stone. (David Shipman writes in The Great Movie Stars that years later, on British TV, Delon "admitted that he had been homosexual, but his succeeding remarks suggested that this was but one facet of a bizarre existence.")
Purple Noon is the most gorgeous film noir ever shot in color. Whether he's photographing an open-air fish market or a killing on the rolling sea, the great cinematographer Henri Decae comes up with colors and images that are eye-popping and fetid at the same time: He creates a visual hothouse from which evil grows. When Delon's Tom Ripley stares at the face of a slimy ray, it looks like they're exchanging trade secrets.
-- Michael Sragow
Michael Sragow reviews new movies for SF Weekly and old ones for The New Yorker.
