Purple Noon
René Clément’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel is a dazzling sea blue film noir rehearsing an energetic sort of corruption based on pure cynicism. Alain Delon’s Tom Ripley is one of two young Americans on an extended European idyll. A cash offer to persuade his companion to return home kindles a fire under Tom’s lust for the other’s money and mistress; hidden talents emerge as he impersonates his (now dead) friend. As in Strangers on a Train, another film about modern anonymity, Highsmith’s sense of decadence is merely the erasure, in plain day, of any pretense to morality or identity.
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