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forger who kills his best friend, Phillipe, one fine day and takes over his
life. He does so in swift obedience to an odd, ambiguous impulse. The
two men have been friends since boyhood; Phillipe (Maurice Ronet) has
long made a game of tweaking Tom's penniless desperation, and likes
to humiliate him in front of Marge, the gypsy-eyed beauty with whom
they're both in love (Marie Laforet). Marge prefers Phillipe despite--or
perhaps because of--his lighthearted brutality. Once Tom has dumped
the body in the middle of the Mediterranean, he uses his flair for
mimicry and forgery to drain the dead man's deeply endowed bank
account and convince the world (especially Marge) that Phillipe is still
alive. His goal? To act as a romantic middleman in the couple's
"breakup," and seduce Marge for himself.
Purple Noon is based on a novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia
Highsmith, whose Strangers on a Train was the basis of the Alfred
Hitchcock classic. In fact, our sympathies are pulled in so many
different directions--especially when Tom is forced to commit a fresh
murder to cover his tracks--that another Hitchcock film, Psycho, comes
to mind. The two films came out the same year; audiences were
evidently readier than ever to root for an ambiguous, sexily perverse
hero.
Director Rene Clement, best-known in this country for Forbidden
Games and Is Paris Burning?, does a first-rate job of seducing the
audience. The film's pace--slow by contemporary standards--has a
jazzy tautness, the Italian seascapes are intoxicating, and Nino Rota's
music creates an invisible fourth character that holds its own with the
dark, antiromantic glamour of Delon. But it is, finally, the central
character who sticks in the memory: Ripley is a suffering Lucifer whose
fall is both total and self-engineered. Like him, Purple Noon is devilishly
seductive.
F.X. Feeney