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. A sun-drenched thriller of envy and impersonation, it remains for many the definitive Ripley, decades before Anthony Minghella's 1999 version.

Delon, impossibly beautiful and quietly 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 cinematographer Henri Decaë drench the film in Mediterranean light, making the glamour itself complicit in the crime, while Nino Rota's score lends an undertow of unease. The result is a thriller as seductive as its anti-hero.

Highsmith herself reportedly admired Delon's performance, and the film fixed an image of cool, amoral charm that 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. Gorgeous, tense and morally slippery, Purple Noon remains one of the great thrillers of European cinema and a definitive portrait of the charming sociopath. Restored and reissued to coincide with renewed interest in Highsmith, it remains, for many, the most seductive screen Ripley of them all. Delon's beauty and cold ambition fixed an image that would shadow his whole career, and the film remains a definitive portrait of the charming sociopath.