Plein Soleil (Purple Noon)

 Plein Soleil (Purple Noon as released in the English-speaking world) is a 1960 psychological crime thriller directed by Rene Clements.  The film is based on a celebrated 1955 novel by Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley, the story later adapted for the screen under that title by Anthony Minghella in  1999.  The French film stars Alain Delon as Tom Ripley, the movie's protagonist.  The film is inconsequential, mildly entertaining with a couple of impressive, if repellent, sequences involving disposal of inconvenient corpses.  Since current audiences know the film's premise (from Minghella's film and the Wim Wenders' movie, The American Friend, an adaptation of another Ripley novel, Ripley's Game, there's nothing novel about the picture:  Clements puts the film through its paces, showcases Italy's seas and scenery (also a feature of Minghella's picture) and brings everything to an unsatisfying ambiguous ending -- except as a study in sociopathy there's nothing much to see here and we have been become jaded, I'm afraid, accustomed to much more lurid villainy than the rather sedate and elegant nastiness that appears in Purple Noon.

Tom Ripley, a handsome young man of ambiguous sexual orientation, is sent to Italy to retrieve a wealthy playboy who is jet-setting about the picturesque environs.  The playboy, a nasty piece of work, is named Philip Greenleaf and he is the scion of a San Francisco ship-building family (hence, the nautical aspects of the story).  Greenleaf knew Ripley from childhood, but, apparently, despises him to some degree because of his declasse origins.  In Rome, Ripley and Greenleaf party, paw ingenues, and, generally, behave like privileged swine (they buy a blind man's cane and Greenleaf pretends to be blind to pick up girls).  Greenleaf is engaged to an art historian, also a wealthy girl, who is writing a book on Fra Angelico.  With Ripley and Marge (the art historian), Greenleaf sets sail for Taormina.  Ripley, who has been trying on Greenleaf's clothing and practicing forging his signature, creates a scene with Marge by displaying an earring that the playboy seized from the ingenue in Rome that he was mauling.  Marge gets put ashore after the vicious Greenleaf throws her manuscript about Fra Angelico into the sea.  Greenleaf persists in taunting Ripley who becomes enraged and, on an impulse, kills the playboy.  This sets up the first impressive suspense sequence in which Ripley tries to dispose of the corpse in a gale that threatens to swamp the sailing boat.  Back on shore, Ripley assumes Greenleaf's identity, uses the dead man's letter of  credit, to withdraw thousands of dollars from a Roman bank, and assures Marge that her fiancee is knocking about somewhere in Italy.  There is an obvious sexual attraction that Marge feels toward the handsome Tom Ripley.  A loathsome buddy of Greenleaf appears, figures out that Tom has killed the playboy, but ends up dead at Ripley's hands as well.  This leads to a second suspense sequence in which Ripley manhandles the dead man down several flights of stairs at his hotel in Rome and, then, secretes the corpse in a sarcophagus in the campagna.  The police are now investigating Greenleaf's disappearance as well as the death of Greenleaf's noxious friend, Freddie.  Ripley retreats to southern Italy and seduces Marge.  He plans to sell the sailing boat but when it is hauled ashore, it's discovered that the body of Greenleaf is still shackled to the vessel by tangled anchor cables.  Presumably, Ripley is apprehended, although the ending is ambiguous.

There's nothing special about the film and it's less compelling than later iterations of the plot by Minghella among others.  Alain Delon is impressive as Ripley and manages to induce audience sympathy with the amoral murderer.  The film makes us complicit in Ripley's crimes.  We feel suspense with him when the police are closing in or when he has to dispose of a corpse.  But the story isn't all that interesting.  The Italian locations are pretty and the glimpse of tourism among the privilegedin the last half of the fifties is interesting.  There's no sense that Delon, a very photogenic Frenchman, is actually supposed to be an American and so this aspect of the plot doesn't seem well developed.  I don't think the film is better than the Minghella version and, so, if the subject interests you, watch that film or the brilliant Wender's American Friend (in which Ripley is played by Dennis Hopper in a big cowboy hat.)