Purple Noon

Tom Ripley (Alain Delon), a young American of no means, has been living it up in Italy with an old stateside acquaintance named Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet), a somewhat dissipated playboy whose carefree lifestyle is maintained with family money. In a Rome cafe, Tom reveals to Philippe that he is in Europe on a mission: Philippe's wealthy father has offered him $5,000 to bring the prodigal son back into the family fold in San Francisco. Philippe hints that he will cooperate.

Tom, Philippe, and his girlfriend, Marge (Marie Laforet), sail for Sicily on Philippe's yacht. During the cruise, Philippe indulges his warped sense of humor by temporarily stranding Tom in a small dinghy under the hot sun. Philippe and Marge have an argument, precipitated in part by Tom, and the girl demands to be put ashore. Now alone with Philippe on the boat, and realizing his companion is probably not going to return to America as he had indicated, Tom stabs Philippe to death and throws the body overboard.

After returning to shore, the murderer embarks on a complex scheme to pass himself off as Philippe and gain access to the dead man's funds. Simultaneously, he covers his felonies by impersonating his victim to Marge over the phone and by sending out letters in Philippe's name.

Freddy Miles (Bill Kearns) looks up his old friend, Philippe, and is surprised to find Tom instead. Fearful of being exposed, Tom kills him. When Freddy's body is discovered, the police, with Tom's help, assume Philippe is the murderer. Next, Tom forges a suicide note in which Philippe wills all his money to Marge. After seducing the bereaved young woman, Tom basks in the knowledge that his diabolical plan is a complete success--he has Philippe's girl and, with her, Philippe's money. But it all backfires when Philippe's corpse is found snarled in a line attached to his yacht. Tom is arrested.

The makers of PURPLE NOON deviated from Patricia Highsmith's source novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, in several ways. Most significantly, in the book, Ripley gets away with his misdeeds. (His comeuppance in the movie, though well mounted, is ill-conceived; leaving Philippe's corpse unscuttled seems a highly unlikely gaffe for a criminal mastermind like Tom.) Furthermore, Philippe (whom Highsmith called "Dickie") is less nasty in the original, making his murder more heinous. These changes, among others, were probably part of an attempt to soften the story's amoral edge and render it more palatable to movie audiences of the time, a group presumed to be more conventionally moralistic than contemporaneous readers of crime fiction.

Drenched in naturalistic, sun-bathed color, everything in PURPLE NOON--except its characters' motives, morals, and manners--is beautiful. Among its visual pleasures: the astonishing handsomeness of the young Delon (who inherited Gerard Philippe's good looks but little of his radiant charm); the teeth and tan of Maurice Ronet; and the eyes of Marie Laforet.

For all its dazzling glamour, PURPLE NOON is a remarkably cold film (not necessarily an important flaw in a thriller). All three of the principal characters have become essentially desexed--Tom by his one-track greed, Philippe by his jaded hedonism, and Marge by the thankless role she has assumed within the triangle: the insecure and nagging girlfriend.

This frostiness is not inappropriate to the unusually efficient thriller which PURPLE NOON becomes, but is disappointing in the wake of the movie's more resonant and disturbing opening section: a titillatingly nasty stretch, crawling with intimations of audacious intrigues, sexual license, sadistic gameplaying, and class warfare. After the startlingly sudden murder of Philippe (who is badly missed thereafter), this front-loaded film settles into a long interval of rather routine how-to-commit-the-perfect-crime nuts and bolts. As continuously interesting as this crime-procedural material is, it is never enthralling. Nearly a decade later, Jean-Pierre Melville would put Delon through comparable cat-and-mouse maneuvers in his crime masterpiece, LE SAMOURAI (1967), to much more memorable effect. (Violence.) leave a comment