Purple Noon

Tom Ripley (Alain Delon) is a loafer and a sponge, but he’s also poor and undistinguished; luckily, Tom is very clever, so when he’s sent to Rome to corral his old friend Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet), whose millionaire father wants him back home in America, their friendship revives in their mutual understanding that Philippe has no intention of honoring his father’s wishes. They spend their time idling around Rome together, sailing together, and chasing girls together. But Philippe knows that Tom is not a true friend; Tom is an interloper and an opportunist, a man who will pursue his own personal gain at all costs. This is the setup for René Clément’s Purple Noon (Plein Soleil, 1960), a beautifully shot adaptation of the 1955 Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. (Anthony Minghella remade it in 1999 under the original title, and cast Matt Damon and Jude Law in the leads.)

Clément and his cinematographer, Henri Decaë, turn a decidedly unpleasant plot into a gorgeous-looking movie set along the sun-baked Mediterranean. It’s hard not to be taken with this film’s visual beauty; it’s also hard to take your eyes off the bronzed, beautiful actors, and that may be the reason that Philippe, who sees through Tom Ripley’s act, allows Tom to accompany him even when he catches Tom wearing his clothes, or flirting with his girlfriend Marge (Marie Laforêt). It’s obvious that Tom is at the very least enamored of Philippe, if not in love with him. And Philippe, perhaps because he’s also something of an egoist, seems flattered by it even if he doesn’t reciprocate. He likes having a devoted follower, someone to envy him; it’s a relationship based on the kind of power Philippe has versus the kind of power Tom has: one of them has money, the other smarts. Tom is a trained observer of people, and he uses this ability time and again to gain information and get what he wants.

When I saw The Talented Mr. Ripley in theaters fifteen years ago, I was struck by the nastiness of the whole plot. Purple Noon somehow manages to subvert that nastiness much more effectively. The moral decay at the core of this story is deliberately at adds with the enchantment of the Continent. Purple Noon is lighter in tone that the 1999 remake. While we’re never fully sympathetic with Tom Ripley or his designs, Clément still makes us identify with him. We fall under his spell too, even though really he’s not as charming as we think. He’s good-looking and ruthless. He knows exactly what to do, what to say, how to act. These are the chief talents of Tom Ripley. The remake turns him into something psychologically perverse: he’s a disturbed weirdo. In Purple Noon, he is a selfish bastard. It's the simplicity of it that makes Purple Noon the better film: it's a movie, not a psyche evaluation. 

Psycho

Psycho may be Alfred Hitchcock's most famous thriller, because of its two notorious scenes of violence. Aesthetically and thematically, Psycho stands apart from the other films generally cited as among the director's best (Rebecca, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, and North By Northwest). It was independently financed by Hitchcock, and shot with the same crew that worked on his television show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. And so it lacks the silky glamour of his 50s films, and is a decidedly more American Gothic than Rebecca, even though both films are about powerful women who manage to maintain control of people and places from beyond the grave.

Because of its filming conditions, Psycho resembles television more than the movies, and its dramatics are corny the way 1950s television dramas were. (It's also economical the way TV has to be.) The story is straightforward, less sophisticated than a lot of Hitchcock's movies (e.g. Rear Window) and less darkly humorous (e.g. Strangers on a Train), but it has all the tantalizingly delicious Freudian psychology of Oedipus and Vertigo, fashioned compactly into a thriller that reshaped the way people made thrillers, and the way people saw them and talked about them and wrote about them. And somehow, its corniness, its simplicity, its one-track direction toward the big reveal, all work for it. Psycho wouldn't have been as memorable, I don't think, if Hitchcock had made it like his other movies.

Hitchcock can never be accused of putting on airs in his movies: he's at his best when he revels in the low arts. His apparently instinctive approach to movies as low art has made his work deliciously entertaining, much like Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), and Stanley Donen's Charade (1963) (three of the great American thrillers). I think most if not all good thrillers are inherently comfortable with their vulgarity. These movies deal with seedy people whose complicated lives are far from glamorous or tidy. Norman Bates is a genuine lunatic with the most dangerous facade of them all: the facade of a sweet, friendly, handsome boy-next-door. He's a villain who's sympathetic, dominated by the even more villainous presence of his mother. And Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) isn't the pure heroine: she's a thief (a one-time thief, but still a thief).

Hitchcock's previous films were certainly suspenseful, but they weren't so centered around the big reveal at the end. People didn't expect the movie's only star, Janet Leigh, to be slashed to death midway through the film, and they didn't expect the movie to then shift gears and be about Norman Bates and the secrets lurking in his creepy old house. I would imagine that even those who had read Robert Bloch's 1959 novel--on which Psycho was based--were expecting some Hollywood-style changes to protect the heroine from the grisly fate of being butchered in the shower. That simply couldn't happen.


With Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Martin Balsam.