Critics reviews

René Clément’s film is luscious and sinister (two words that could describe Delon), and in this adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, the actor is on display, in full color, in various stages of stylishness or shirtlessness.

The gorgeous cinematography (beginning with a credit sequence in which a recognizable Rome, seen from above, appears dipped in a series of intense colors) is only one aspect of the filmic beauty. Equally important is the casting: the luscious Alain Delon as Ripley, the hunky Maurice Ronet as Greenleaf, and even the seductive Marie Laforêt as Marge—the sole female character of note, who in Highsmith's version is merely a gourd-shaped loudmouth aspiring to be Greenleaf's steady girlfriend.

Aside from its tag as a thriller about a gentleman psychopath, Plein Soleil, also examines the desperate measures one might take to lift themselves from penury and live, illicitly, extremely high on the hog. It's a character study, but also a critique of consumerism and the antisocial baggage that comes from its unalloyed indulgence. And it's only the final clever twist that lets down the material, a handy literary conceit that's lost in the world of movies.

The subtext of what we witness is open-ended and limitless in its ambiguity. However precise and elegant its surfaces, Purple Noon remains tantalizingly elusive, a beautifully made object always just out of reach—in that respect, just like its source novel.

Clément's revisions are likely meant to suggest that when crime is oriented around shallow exercises of power, it becomes not only destined to fail but banal as well. I doubt, however, he realized how Purple Noon illustrates that the same is true of film.