Purple Noon

It appears the "Purple Noon" story line has been detailed quite well in prior reviews, so no need to go on about it again. What I want to add is that this film could serve as a wonderful introduction to Alain Delon for a new generation. If you have never seen this actor at work, treat yourself to "Purple Noon" and think of it as a primer. It is much better than ".....Mr. Ripley", as it doesn't have the unrelenting, distasteful sense of evil and unpleasantness of Matt Damon's version. Damon simply cannot match Delon for all the facets the Frenchman gives his character. Delon makes the character so intriguing, you rather want to see him get away with it!
Delon was and remains one of the most exciting, beautiful actors ever to come out of Europe. The U.S. has never produced an actor to match him for sheer beauty, grace and charisma. Those eyes make you want to know what is going on behind them. The intrigue is always there and you cannot take your eyes off him.
Delon has a son who works very hard to follow in his father's playboy footsteps, but he lacks the class, pure beauty and grace of his father. I hope that once you've seen "Purple Noon", you will move on to his even better films, i.e. "Mr. Klein" or "Le Samourai" and others. Not many are available as yet, but hopefully time will correct this oversight.
One film called "Have I the Right to Kill?" was recently run on TCM, but is not available as yet in any format. It also is dubbed, rather than sub-titled, which for me, lessens the film, but it is still good viewing.

Try "Purple Noon", sit back and watch this graceful, beautiful man turn on sex appeal the like of which you will never see again. Once you see him, you will want more, I guarantee it.
(Please note there is a new, first time release of a collection of his decent but somewhat lesser films available on Amazon called "Alain Delon - Five Films". I remain hopeful that his truly great films will show up in a collection soon)

Not only faithful to Highsmith's great book, the cast gets the cool objectivity of her writing and is perfectly matched to the characters they are portraying, the movie also captures the bygone era of the South of France in the 1950s, its gentle rhythms a marvelous counterpoint to the tension of the unfolding drama.

Forget Matt Damon. Ladies, Alain Delon will crawl up your skin and send tingles where you want tingles to be and where you don't want them to be. Hard to explain the appeal of this film from 1960 but it is far more definitive and truer to the novel than johnny-come-lately versions. The Talented Mr Riply delivers a performance that defined his career up to 'Le Samourai' which defined 'cool' to several generations thereafter. Largely unknown in the USA, after some ill fated attempts at Holywood movies in the late sixties, Delon is one of France's biggest stars. He and Jean-Paul Belmondo were the Redford and Newman of their generation. His looks work to his advantage here but his eyes offer a depth of hunger, greed, and avarice that few actors could have pulled off encased in all that male beauty. An excellent movie for contemplating just how far you'd go to have someone else's wealth and life.

Alain Delon takes identity theft to the extreme in this stylish French thriller. Based on Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, René Clément's (1913-1996) film, Purple Noon (Plein Soleil)(1960) stars Delon in the role of Tom Ripley, a "suave, agreeable and utterly amoral" con artist. Claiming he was sent to Italy to persuade his friend, Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet), to return to San Francisco and run his father's business, Ripley becomes enamoured with Philippe, his privileged lifestyle, his playboy personality, and his trés sexy girlfriend, Marge (Marie Laforêt). In response, Philippe becomes adversarial toward Ripley. Ripley then decides to kill Philippe and assume his identity, supporting his charade using Philippe's name and money. He then attempts to seduce Marge. Delon's acclaimed performance as the charismatic sociopath Ripley made him a star; Marie Laforêt went on to become a French pop rock sensation. The movie was remade in 1999, starring Matt Damon as Ripley, Jude Law as Greenleaf, and Gwyneth Paltrow as Marge. However Clément's suspenseful film noir version is the better of the two.

G. Merritt

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.