Rich Man, Poor Man: Purple Noon (1960)
This French adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel is crisp and gorgeous but doesn’t have the nerve the book does.
Most successful novel adaptations require fidelity to the source, but there are exceptions. Patricia Highsmith’s novels are often used a starting point for movies that explore the criminal mind without any concession to moralizing. Her characters are always in moral grey areas, but they manage to seduce the audience with their nerve until their darkest desires seem perfectly reasonable. Highsmith’s most famous novel was The Talented Mr. Ripley published in 1955 and was first turned into a 1960 movie called Plein Sol (mistranslated into Purple Noon). While the film takes some liberties with the events in the novel, director Rene Clement never lets the suspense drag, or forget that its the charm of the psychopathic protagonist that really makes the story unforgettable.
The Story
Tom Ripley has been hired by wealthy businessman Herbert Greenleaf to find his son Dickie (who he believes Ripley knows from school) in Italy and bring him back to America to join the family business. Ripley, a conman who longs for luxury and only casually knows Dickie, s instantly obsessed with Dickie’s glamorous life in Europe and carefree, entitled personality, soon spending all his time with him and his fiancee Marge. At first Dickie and Ripley are close but when Dickie tires of him, Ripley kills him on a boat with an oar. He then takes Dickie’s identity and travels around Italy, telling Marge that Dickie has left her. When Freddie, an old friend of Dickie’s finds Ripley in Dickie’s apartment, he becomes suspicious so Ripley kills him and hides the body. The Italian police are soon looking for Dickie Greenleaf, as is a suspicious Marge and Ripley switches between identities to keep both the scam and his new life.
The Adaptation
Highsmith’s novels have been frequently adapted onto screen and her favorite character, Tom Ripley, has appeared on screen no less than five times. Highsmith specialized in getting audiences to root for unlikeable protagonists who were often psychopathic creeps. Her novels, particularly those that feature Ripley, are filled with anxiety and paranoia; the atmosphere is always tense because morality is somewhat optional. Ripley might be talented, but he wants to be Dickie Greenleaf, and is seduced by his vagabond European lifestyle. The novel has themes similar to a Henry James novel; the American who comes to the decadent old world of Italy and finds himself corrupted and seduced. Only in this case, Ripley is the corrupting force; he commits murder calmly and with minimal emotion, jettisoning his insecurities but not his paranoia. Highsmith makes it clear more than once that Ripley’s feelings for Dickie are sexual in nature; he fantasizes about Dickie killing Marge because she has become an imposition on his time with Ripley.
Purple Noon was the first adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, and often considered the best. The movie is glorious to behold, saturated with rich colors of the Italian Riviera and with beautiful people. Perhaps the most beautiful is Ripley himself, played by the stunning Alain Delon, who fascinates us as Ripley. Highsmith described Ripley as cultured but insecure and delusional; Delon seems too urbane and far too beautiful to play someone who despises himself enough to want to inhabit someone else’s life and personality. Nonetheless, he manages to capture Ripley’s mystique; though we cannot look away from him, we never know what he’s thinking.
In fact, some of the most successful Highsmith adaptations (like Strangers on a Train in 1951) are not particularly faithful to the source. She writes tersely and simply; she is better at telling us a character’s motivations than letting us know how they feel. Purple Noon begins in Italy, where Ripley has already befriended Philippe and Marge and ingratiated himself in their lives. The entire first section of the book — with Tom’s dreary New York life and his compulsive failed scams — are left out, so we are never clear on why Ripley becomes so desperate to become Dickie Greenleaf, or resort to murder. Dickie (here called Philippe) is one of Fitzgerald’s “careless people.” used to privilege and wealth, insensitive and unfaithful, and most importantly, easily bored. In the novel. Dickie becomes tired of Ripley, who is clearly not as upper-crust as he pretends, and this leads to his death. In the movie, however, Philippe is just cruel. He persecutes Ripley, mocking the way he eats and leaving him on a dingy to get painfully sunburned; he later throws Marge’s entire dissertation into the sea. When Ripley finally kills him, it feels like revenge as much as desperation and repressed desire. Indeed, Ripley’s latent homosexuality is only present in scenes where the men bond over whispered secrets; this Ripley seems motivated more by greed than anything else.
For the most part, Purple Noon was received universal critical acclaim, but one alteration was condemned by both film critics and Patricia Highsmith herself: Ripley gets caught. In the novel, he forges a will from Dickie leaving everything to himself and ends up wealthy and satisfied — if still a little paranoid. In the movie, Ripley romances Marge and is about to live happily ever after until Philippe’s body is found on the boat. Highsmith criticized the film for giving into the pettiness of “so-called public morality” and it does feel like a letdown. We are seduced not by wealthy and boisterous Philippe, but by Ripley’s scheming charm; having accompanied him all this way, we hope for his success even though it makes us uncomfortable. It’s also jarring that Ripley seduces Marge, who is the beneficiary of his forgery of Philippe’s will. In the novel, Ripley is physically repulsed by Marge, who is he sees as a barrier between him and Dickie. The homoerotic feelings of the first part of the movie are replaced with a traditional heteronormative (if still manipulative) romance which don’t feel nearly as strong.
Nonetheless, despite the unevenness of the changes, it can’t really be said that Purple Noon is a ineffective adaptation of Highsmith’s novel. In fact, the movie captures everything about the story, from the seduction of wealth to the temptations of murder to the slipperiness of Ripley’s charm. It’s an adaptation that understands the spirit of the novel, and ropes the audience into hoping that Ripley’s crimes pay, and pay well.
