Purple Noon (1960)

Purple Noon, René Clément's 1960 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, comes to us from a distant country where a crime film was permitted to remain a crime film. Alain Delon, in his first major role, plays Tom Ripley, an American con artist dispatched to Italy to retrieve a wealthy playboy and instead deciding to become him. The plot proceeds by forgery, seduction, and a knife. Nobody apologizes for any of it.

Seen through the lens of present-day cultural expectations, the film is a barren field. The cast is entirely white and European, and the question of representation never arises. Marge, the fiancée, exists to be deceived and eventually seduced. She is given no interiority worth naming. Race, climate, body image, neurodivergence: none of these concerns have been invented for the screen yet, and the film does not anticipate them. The homoerotic charge in Ripley's fixation on Philippe is present but unspoken, folded into atmosphere instead of identity. The story involves great wealth and a man clawing his way toward it, yet it never pauses to indict the system that produced the fortune. It simply wants the fortune.

What remains is a cool, amoral entertainment with no interest in instructing anybody. Ripley murders two people and the camera regards him with the same even gaze it gives the Mediterranean. There is no sermon, no moral ledger, no third act in which someone explains the theme aloud. The ending, which Highsmith herself despised as a concession to public morality, is the closest the film comes to a statement, and it is a cynical one. A viewer hoping to be told what to think will leave unsatisfied. A viewer hoping to watch a beautiful man get away with everything, briefly, will be well served.