Purple Noon (Clement): Film-Review

This is an 'essay-review' of a lauded 1960 Rene Clement film which inspired both a 1999 remake starring Matt Damon and a recent short I myself wrote on WritersCafe.

I wanted to offer up an 'essay-review' of the remarkable foreign film Purple Noon (Rene Clement) starring the talented Alain Delon in a film adapted by an acclaimed novel which was again adapted into the acclaimed 1999 film starring Matt Damon in the starring-role Delon played in 1960, since I just wrote a nifty little 'period-piece' inspired loosely by this amazing film. Enjoy (and thanks for reading), 

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This rather searing and well-crafted foreign film stars the excellent foreign-star Alain Delon in the star-role of Tom Ripley, a sort of wandering American who's sent to Italy to find the son of a wealthy businessman in San Francisco who insists the son return to America to take over the family-business. The son is Phillippe Greenleaf (nicely-portrayed by Maurice Ronet) and he lives a life in Italy of luxury and hotel-amenity with his girlfriend Marge (also well-portrayed by Marie Laforet). Greenleaf refuses to return home immediately and instead 'drags' the 'ambitious' Tom along on his sailboat and around Italy and exposes him to the 'high-life' of Europe, which draws Tom Ripley (Alain Delon) to a state of fascination...and envy!

Now, Alain Delon has made a few other films of note, including Airport '79, which is also a nice film (USA), but this Clement 'masterpiece' really stamped Delon onto the cinematic landscape and affirmed him as a thespian of real talent/promise. His portrayal of the wandering American Tom Ripley who's got a special 'eye' for luxury and wealth and develops ambition and envy for Phillippe Greenleaf and decides to murder him and attempt to simply 'take-over' his life, if only in a hazed daydream of escapist fantasy and thievery. He forges documents to pass himself off as the 'Greenleaf son' while spending his money...and even attempting to 'woo' his surviving girlfriend, the delicate but sophisticated Marge. He learns along the way that his inherent nature is in piracy and wandering musketeership, but he also starts to sincerely appreciate the fineries of aristocratic 'artistic' life, if only the daydream of the 'fashion' of it all. We get a real sense of why Delon was the perfect actor for the role that introduced audiences to the notion of sensitized condition-based 'flair-action' acting which is slightly different from method-acting.

After disposing of Phillippe and trying to pick up the trail of his newfound daydream ambition, Tom Ripley is 'haunted' by Greenleaf's buddy, the wandering aristocrat Freddy (nicely-portrayed by Billy Kearns) and has to 'deal' with him too, when Freddy suspects his old wealthy prince-pal Phillippe may have been 'hoodwinked' by the 'talented Mr. Ripley' in Italy. He continues to try to sneak out of society with this newfound 'dream-glory' and is eventually tracked by officials who finally suspect foul-play in what becomes a rather subtle if anticlimactic ending involving the 'dragon(s)' of criminal procedure!

What sets this heist-noir film of envy and luxury apart from other stories about a life of wandering criminality or seduction or betrayal or Wanderlust is Clement's use of scenery and human touch to create a 'real feeling' of tangible mystery and suspicions and perhaps even cynicism towards the aristocracy, though it never abandons a rather 'haunting' elegiac approach to the 'quality' of envy and why the high-life of modern aristocracy may ironically engender in us all a strange 'sense' of human frailty. Delon is the perfect Ripley (though Matt Damon did a thoroughly 'decent' job in the 1999 remake by Anthony Minghella). Delon offers us a 'visage' of an 'anti-prince' of philosophical proportions but also of a certain 'd' distaste, which I think makes this film/tale one of timeless...deformity. It's a real entertaining view, for anyone interested in life's strange darkness.

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"Money is everything" (Ecclesiastes)