Rent Purple Noon (1960)

Hitchcockian Highsmith - Purple Noon review by NO

Excellent film-have not read the book but enjoyed this.Good story,well acted with stunning locations.

Identity theft the old-fashioned way - Purple Noon review by Count Otto Black

Firstly, as noted by previous reviewers, if you've seen "The Talented Mister Ripley", this film won't hold too many surprises for you, since it's the first screen version of the same story, and Alain Delon's character is indeed called Tom Ripley, despite not by any stretch of the imagination being plausibly American.

Apart from that, Delon is astonishingly good as the psychopathic anti-hero. Since it's almost a one-man show, he has to be. Fortunately the screenplay develops the character in sufficiently interesting ways to make us care about him. Initially he's willing to be the lackey of the rich people who employ him or treat him as a casually disposable "friend", taking what scraps he can from their table and hiding his envy and resentment. But the way he's treated, especially the incident referred to by the original French title (which means "plenty of sun" - not too snappy in English, hence the meaningless substitute), makes us understand why he might reasonably feel that he'd been pushed too far. Though of course, he himself pushes it even further. And then some!

Halfway between the unstoppable, implacable Hannibal Lecter and the twitchy, desperate Norman Bates, you've got Tom Ripley, a psycho who really will do just about anything, but isn't quite as clever as he thinks he is, and is at the same time smart enough to worry about this, not necessarily in time to avoid screwing up. French cinema has always been far better than Hollywood at putting utterly twisted people front and center and making them worth watching - just look at "Rififi" or "Les Diaboliques" - and here we have another superb example. Delon's interplay with Maurice Ronet, playing his obliviously crass "buddy", is absolutely perfect, for which Ronet (basically a French version of the unfairly forgotten Robert Shaw) deserves a lot of credit.

Unfortunately some of the other supporting cast are treated less well. The very sweet Marie Laforêt doesn't have enough to do, and since the lady can actually sing, she should have been given a proper chance to do so if they were going to have her strum a guitar and go "la, la, la" at all. And what's with that ballet school? I assume it's a major subplot in the original novel, which I haven't read, but here it seems to have been randomly inserted for no reason at all. So it's not a perfect movie. But as a portrait of a man tiptoeing along the edge of a razor for reasons that are (almost) entirely his own fault, it's very good indeed. And the whole thing looks so gorgeous that you'll probably want to go on holiday at the locations on the off-chance they're still unspoiled (I wouldn't know, but somehow I doubt it). Early sixties European cinema at very nearly its very best. Highly recommended.