Purple Noon
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Features
• Color
• Letterboxed
• Widescreen
• NTSC
In Theaters : 01 January, 1960 |
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Purple Noon Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
The fine art of murder
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Patricia Highsmith's THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY might be the finest American suspense thriller ever written. A clever young man from a disadvantaged background is sent abroad by an industrialist to bring home the latter's spoiled and vicious son; befriending the young rotter in Italy, the antihero becomes enamored of his decadent lifestyle and kills him so he can assume his identity. The novel is not only suspenseful but it forms a brilliant disquisition on the nature of identity at mid-century, and its relationship to texts, reputation, and capital. Two very intelligent films have been made from it that capture different parts of it successfully: the latest is Anthony Minghella's 1999 big-budget Hollywood thriller starring Matt Damon, but the first was this beautifully photographed French version directed by Rene Clement starring Alain Delon as Ripley.
Clement's version succeeds best in its evocation of the lovely rarefied atmosphere of the tourist Italy of the American jetset: the cinematography has a crystalline postcard beauty that makes Rome and the Italian coast seem supernatually beautiful. It also has a much better Ripley in Delon than Minghella had in Damon: Delon is much less hesitant and much more desperate and amoral, and he also has the requisite handsomeness (and facial resemblance to the rich wastrel he murders and replaces) that Damon lacks. As the gorgeous, cruel Dickie Greenleaf (here called Phillipe), Maurice Ronet is absolutely first-rate, toying with Ripley in the mistaken belief that he holds all the cards in their friendship. Less successful as Phillipe's emotionally abused girlfriend Marge is Marie Leforet, who doesn't seem to react to Phillipe at all as an American girl would ever conceiveably do. The film is great at conveying an aura of homoerotic decadence, but it loses quite a bit by beginning the story in medias res: by not showing us the circumstances from which Ripley came, we have little sense at what is at stake in his masquerade. But this is this fine adaptation's only major shortcoming. |
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Purple Noon dvd movie.