Purple Noon

René Clément's Purple Noon (1960) was the first screen adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, and it made a star of Alain Delon. It is a sun-drenched thriller of envy and impersonation, and for many viewers it is still the definitive Ripley, decades before Anthony Minghella's 1999 version.

Delon, impossibly beautiful and faintly reptilian, plays Tom Ripley, the social interloper who covets the gilded existence of his wealthy acquaintance Philippe (Maurice Ronet) aboard a yacht off the Italian coast. Clément and the cinematographer Henri Decaë soak the film in Mediterranean light until the glamour itself seems complicit in the crime, and Nino Rota's score runs an undertow of unease beneath it all. It is a thriller as seductive as its anti-hero, and Delon was rarely better used.

Highsmith herself reportedly admired Delon's performance, and the image of cool, amoral charm and cold ambition that it fixed would shadow Delon's whole career. Its influence runs through later Highsmith adaptations and through the entire subgenre of sun-bleached crime; the Minghella film openly echoes its compositions. Restored and reissued as interest in Highsmith revived, Purple Noon is one of the great thrillers of European cinema and the definitive portrait of the charming sociopath. For many viewers, and for us, it is also still the most seductive screen Ripley of them all.