Welcome to The Movie Shelf, an ongoing series that compares the films on our dvd shelves to the novels on our bookcases.
We at the 'Smoke have always been fascinated by screenplay adaptation: what a script writer takes from the source material, what gets discarded, how the two works differ from each other and what the existence of the movie itself says about the book (and vice versa.) It's "book versus movie" time, compadres.
"His stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them."
~ by christopher funderburg ~
Tom Ripley, a character who has been written about plenty, usually gets described as a con man, a con artist, a sociopath, a serial murderer - but when I read the books, especially the extraordinary initial entry in the 5 volume series, the words that come to mind are flâneur, idler, wanderer. Ripley’s essential characteristics are not contained in the crimes he’s willing to commit but in the life he’s aimlessly searching for.
He’s defined by a subconscious compulsion not to violence & mayhem but to dawdling & drifting - far more time is spent in the first novel on his tourism, his parsing of guidebooks and jaunts to small villages along the Italian & French coasts, than on the pair of murders he commits only because he’s unable to let go of the idea of a life of leisure spent in Europe.
He dreams of Greece, of Paris, of the Côte d'Azur and Monaco; he’s humiliated late in the novel by the idea that he might not be able to afford an expensive monograph on Roman art. The idea of killing, the nature of his crimes, is frequently described as being somehow easy or thoughtless for him - that he’s a heartless cipher acting without conscience - but it’s more complicated than that: he breaks out into hot & cold sweats over what he’s done, he’s plagued by nightmares of his victim re-emerging from the ocean, he feels himself constantly on the edge of vomiting in a guilty panic.
Tom Ripley is not a man driven by thoughts of murder, compelled by a perverse glee from his deceptions; he’s a man who would like to travel the world, book in hand, and idle on the beach or at a museum. And as near as he can tell it, the only thing standing in his way of living exactly that life is the irritating fact that he’s Tom Ripley.
"Hadn't he learned something from these last months? If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture."
The novel, one of the great American novels if there were one, deals almost exclusively with Ripley’s erratic, startling, deeply unsympathetic interior life. Usually, a crime novelist allows us into a criminal’s mind as a way of generating sympathy, creating engagement in the story through understanding: we buy into the story as we’re brought around to the criminal’s way of thinking. The author wants you to grasp the reasons why their character does the terrible things they do, what traumas and injustices and relatable emotions drive them outside the bounds of conventional morality.
Highsmith pulls an exceptional reversal: it’s impossible to like Tom Ripley when you know what he’s thinking and the novel lives almost entirely within his thought-process. The elisions in his interior life are unsettling, they aren’t typical exculpatory self-deceptions but demonstrations of his carelessness and true focus: when he forgets something important about the murders and forgeries and impersonations he’s undertaking it’s not because he’s lying to himself (or worse, because Highsmith is attempting to trick the audience) but because he simply doesn’t give a shit. Did Tom Ripley forget to send an exculpatory letter? Who knows? Who cares? Not Tom Ripley. Not until he realizes the idiotic mistake he’s made and then it’s all cold sweats and stress carried in the jaw.
The scariest moment comes late in the book when he’s thinking about Richard Greenleaf, the strapping beach bum trust-fund layabout whose life he has assumed after murdering the poor guy: he still considers Dickie his best friend. There’s a pathetic indignant panic to Ripley’s belief in the meaning of his brief friendship with Dickie. It’s deeply unsettling to know that this is both patently delusional and entirely honest - if we can make a distinction between truth and honesty. It’s a terrifyingly human moment: the friend who doesn’t care about us, the friend who we don’t care enough about, the best friend who we feel like murdering and would miss desperately if they were gone. It’s proof that Tom Ripley is utterly insane but deeply human.
The story of The Talented Mr. Ripley follows the set-up of Henry James’ The Ambassadors, as Highsmith herself points out within the novel: a young man, Ripley, is engaged by a wealthy husband and wife to go to Europe and bring home their young adult son who is shirking all his responsibilities in favor of enjoying the good life. Richard “Dickie” Greenleaf1 spends his days in the tiny coastal village of Mongibello painting, swimming, eating and not much else with his friend Marge Sherwood, an aspiring “female novelist” who would very much like to be more than friends with Dickie.
The title is designed to make you wonder what Ripley’s talent might be - he’s surrounded by artists, novelists, painters, who don’t impress him: he seems to despise all of his friends2, everyone he meets bores him, everyone around him is tacky, tasteless, talentless. He’s a character perpetually trapped in conversations in which he doesn’t want to be involved, desperate to find a way to slip out of the party, disgusted with the nit-wits and gauche socialites who he finds himself in the company of.
Even as he begins to focus his obsessions on Dickie, he can’t help but criticize Dickie’s efforts as a painter as being hopeless. Dickie covers every canvas with trite little Mongibello vistas where the sky is far too blue and the homes dotting the mountainside far too white. Even as he becomes psychically enthralled with Greenleaf, Ripley never believes Dickie to have any talent.
Ripley frequently gets described as debonair or charming, but it’s not true: no one seems to particularly like him or, if they do, they sour on him quickly. One of the most vivid asides in the book is Ripley getting told to “oh, shut the hell up” after telling what he thinks is a funny (entirely invented) anecdote about something he said to his therapist.
Dickie’s Mongibello companion Marge Sherwood quickly turns on him, characters constantly sniff out his sexuality and deride him for being “queer” or a “sissy,” none of his charades and deceptions seem to go over as well as he’s expecting them to. It’s a pointed comment by Highsmith to have Ripley be a failed actor who gave up on the profession after a series of rejections. It’s not a mistake that she makes his “one-man skits” sound awful.
Ripley’s talent is not for charm or deception, he succeeds almost entirely through luck and coincidence - police incompetence and the naivety of Dickie’s family and friends are running themes. He’s not particularly good at anything, let alone crime, where he makes a dozen dumb mistakes, nearly every one of which comes perilously close to bringing him down. The Talented Mr. Ripley doesn’t give you the impression of watching a criminal mastermind in action but in witnessing a series of improvised idiocies all fall in a man’s favor.
You might think I’m leading up to proposing my take on Ripley’s True Talent but I’m not. I think the title is pretty plainly meant to be ironic. There’s a bitterness to it: in his mind, everyone is talentless, everyone is a bore, so what does that make Tom Ripley?
He’s another talentless nobody, another nothing, another cipher taking up space at an awful party.
That’s why it’s necessary to become Dickie Greenleaf. But not just Dickie Greenleaf, an improved Dickie Greenleaf with no delusions that his amateur painting will ever amount to anything, a Dickie Greenleaf without the millstone of Marge Sherwood hanging around his neck, a Dickie Greenleaf who lives the perfect life that his fortune and beauty dictates he should. And if he can’t be Dickie Greenleaf, maybe the fortune was the only thing that mattered anyway.
Highsmith writes in measured, controlled prose that doesn’t feel like it has been fussed over - the most difficult kind of prose to write. It’s tempting to call her style casual, but there’s no looseness to it. And it’s tempting to call her plotting messy or sprawling since the stories arc away from the traditional trajectories of crime fiction - their strange forms are why film adaptations tend to ignore/reimagine the second half of the novels they’re taken from.
A Highsmith novel never goes anywhere you expect it to go but somehow always ends up in a place that felt inevitable. For some reason, filmmakers believe that to be a defect in her plotting and attempt to reconfigure the stories along more traditional paths. Part of this is undoubtedly that her hooks are killer: a pair of strangers agree to trade murders, an unhappy husband uncovers the perfect murder and attempts to repeat it, a white collar drone creates a double-life to deal with romantic rejection - stories built around gripping concepts that in actuality are concerned with entirely different things.
Like most filmmakers who adapt Highsmith, René Clément makes you wonder what the hell possessed him to take on the material. Hitchcock’s enthusiasm for risible gay-baiting made Strangers on a Train a good match for his sensibility and Wim Wenders’ being offered the rights for Ripley’s Game as a consolation prize for missing out on The Cry of the Owl explains The American Friend but Clément joins the tradition of filmmakers who just don’t seem to get it with Highsmith - maybe unsurprisingly, it’s journeymen and hacks that tend to direct these adaptations.
Clément had a long and distinguished career reworking novels that he made no secret of looking down on with a feigned paternalistic kindness, The Glass Castle or Monsieur Ripois for example. In that context, it makes sense that he’d set out to “fix” a semi-disreputable American crime novel by an author who hadn’t yet in 1960 fully attained her rightful place in the canon. In interviews, he made no secret of what he perceived to be the book’s narrative flaws, congratulating himself and screenwriter Paul Gégauff in a 1981 L'Avant-scène cinéma interview: “We pulled off all sorts of acrobatics to make the action unfold believably.”
For a concrete example, in the same interview he makes the ludicrous assertion, “But a corpse is heavy, you don’t dispose of it as easily as in a novel” - ludicrous, when all of Ripley’s troubles in getting a dead body overboard are lifted from the book. In terms of corpse-disposal, Highsmith’s novel focuses almost exclusively on the physical exhaustion and near-inability of Ripley in moving the bodies of his victims around. In both the book and the film, in his efforts to get Greenleaf overboard Ripley tumbles into the ocean himself. In the book, it’s a harrowing sequence where he nearly drowns. In the movie, it’s an inconvenience glossed over in a matter of seconds. And then once more, the troubles moving Freddie Miles are similarly taken from the book and abbreviated.
Most egregiously, Clément has this to say about the character of Ripley: “He is a horrible guy, but you don’t make films with despicable people - that doesn’t work.” Maybe don’t adapt Ripley then. Better yet, stay away from Highsmith altogether. The whole thing reminds me of Larry Cohen’s anecdote about sitting down for a meeting with Michael Bay to discuss him directing Cohen’s script for Phone Booth. “First thing’s first, how do we get this guy out of the phone booth?”
If your big concern is “how do we get over the central idea of the story?” maybe move on to something more your slow-pitch speed. None of this is to say Plein soliel is a bad movie. It’s an excellent movie in many ways, in most ways even. But from the start, you can feel something wrong with it. It’s a bad omen that the filmmakers chose to replace an unforgettable title with a vague & pretentious one (which was then somewhere down the line given the notoriously nonsensical & deliberately artsy/fartsy English-language title of Purple Noon.) “Full Sun” sounds like an Important Movie - Clément’s film has made every effort to present itself as a masterpiece and almost pulls it off through sheer dumb luck.
Like many established French directors, the French New Wave had steam-rolled Clément’s relevancy overnight and his work from the 60’s finds him desperately attempting to keep up.3 Clément, who has no particular artistic stamp, changed his approach entirely with Purple Noon. His aesthetic in the film reminds you once more of Tom Ripley getting away with a surprisingly effective charade - Purple Noon is a great film but it is a rank film: it’s the movie Tom Ripley would’ve made about his own life; sexier, more stylish, more logical, more gripping than the book on which it is based.
In adapting the script, Clément employed the previously mentioned Paul Gégauff during a brief stretch where the screenwriter worked almost exclusively with Claude Charbol. (Gégauff also wrote a film for New Waver Éric Rohmer, The Sign of Leo, that shot in the summer of 1959 just before Purple Noon but wouldn't be released until later on.) Cahier du Cinema critic-turned-filmmaker Chabrol was the French New Wave director most associated with the thriller genre and later would try his own hand at Highsmith with the brilliant The Cry of the Owl, though Gégauff wouldn’t be involved.
With 400 Blows as well as Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins coming along just before Purple Noon went into production in August of 1959, the New Wave sensibility had already razed the world-cinema landscape and filmmakers like Clément scrambled to reconfigure their artistic identities in order to not be left behind. In a more general way, Purple Noon apes the French New Wave. It plays into their affection for Hitchcock & low-brow thrillers (a distinct switch from Clément’s focus on middle-brow dramas) - the choice of Highsmith, whose first novel Strangers on a Train had been made into one of Hitchcock’s most enduring films, feels like a nod in that direction.
Beyond that, film’s gorgeous location photography was clearly inspired by the New Wave movement’s enthusiasm for filming in real places using natural light, cinematographer Henri Decaë having filmed Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge, À double tour and Les Cousins previously.4 In swiping his cinematographer and screenwriter to tackle a Hitchcockian thriller, it’s tempting to say Clément tried to pull a Ripley to Chabrol’s Greenleaf but truthfully Chabrol wouldn’t fully find his voice until a decade or so later.
The New Wave sensibility can be further seen in Clément’s insistence that the film had been made with a meaningful amount of improvisation - letting Delon figure out certain physical actions on camera without direction, capturing the happy accident of a Danish King’s massive sailboat in the moments after Dickie Greenleaf's murder5 - reads like the aging filmmaker playing catch-up with the neophyte New Wavers who had almost instantaneously eclipsed him in esteem.
While working on this piece, I went back over New Wave icon François Truffaut’s writing on Clément, knowing that the Cahiers du Cinema critics had a reputation for being particularly cruel towards him and I was delighted to discover this line in Truffaut’s dismissive review of Monsieur Ripois: “Clément’s talent is as an imitator.” The Talented Mr. Clément. Fascinatingly, Truffaut’s notorious distaste for Clément never has any heat on it - a contrast to, say, his furious obliteration of Anatole Litvak or spirited lampooning of Albert Lamorisse. With Clément, Truffaut always seems bored, he clearly finds Clément as tedious and unworthy of his attention as Ripley finds Marge Sherwood and her impending novel.
His words on Ripois could just as easily be applied to Purple Noon: “When in his adaptation he suppressed everything that was moving in Hemon’s book, Clément behaved like the pseudo-intellectuals with which French cinema is overpopulated, half-educated scholars for whom the height of genius is to remove from art anything that comes from the heart.”6
The liner notes by Geoffrey O’Brien in the Criterion edition of the film mention that for a time, the success of Purple Noon made Clément yet another “French Hitchcock,” a title that every mildly notable French director of thrillers seems to have held. The accusation fits a little better on Clément than it ever did on H.G. Clouzot or Claude Chabrol, both of whom have strong and original artistic identities. Purple Noon could’ve been made by anyone, so it certainly could’ve been made by someone other than Clément and its standard issue thriller conception owes as much to Hitchcock as anyone I suppose; The Talented Imitator caught trying on Mr. Hitchcock’s clothes.7
Purple Noon is very straight-ahead, there’s very little narrative fat, it generally keeps to the point, it builds suspense in an unsurprising fashion and releases it according to plan. It moves and acts very much like a thriller, with pursued men slipping out of hotel rooms via the balcony and hidden corpses revealing themselves at the worst possibly times. There are slow-burning scenes of meticulous planning and moments of confrontation with authority figures where all our hero can do is sweat out their bluff.
Its gestures are carefully selected to give the distinct impression that this is exactly what a thriller is and very much should be. It parcels out information with craft and precision, directs our attention to impending doom, organizes itself admirably in terms of story-telling.8 It’s a film with as much fidelity as it can have to the ancient Aristotelian ideas about unity of space and time. It compacts the action of the story into as few scenes as possible and confines much of the first half to a sailboat.
By contrast, there are surprising jumps in space and time in the novel - suddenly we’re aware a month has passed because Ripley remembers he forgot to write letters that should have been sent weeks ago. A quick trip to one village suddenly becomes a more substantial trek to Rome. We lose track of important threads, crucial schemes are revealed already well-underway before we’re made aware of them, locales shift desultorily. Highsmith uses these elisions and zags off course to emphasize Ripley’s carelessness & narcissism. Ripley is only interested in what Ripley is interested in, Highsmith drives this home with her story-telling techniques. In interviews, Clément calls these elisions “indefensible” narrative gaps - you almost can’t believe he’s that dumb.
The open, thrilling question of just how sloppy Ripley has been with some forged signatures drives that subplot of book: we’re off-balance because we’re never sure if we can believe Ripley’s insanely casual assessment that he had done a good job with the bank forgeries (that until this moment of their rejection we had never heard him mention) or if his indifference is a dead give-away of sloppiness. To show Delon cleverly and painstakingly mastering the forged signature over the course of a montage sequence defeats the entire point.
From the start, Clément tries to re-stack Highsmith’s deck: the film begins in medias res with Ripley and Dickie carousing around in Rome. Clément lops off the entire front of the novel, not only the lengthy sequence of Ripley in New York but also Ripley’s initial painful attempts to ingratiate himself into Dickie’s life. We get no sense of Ripley as unhappy, lonely, dishonest, erratic, no glimpse of his hare-brained income-tax rip-off scheme, no scenes of him squirming in loathing of his ostensible friends, no idea that he’s scamming Greenleaf’s parents for a free trip to Italy.
When we meet Greenleaf in the film, he’s already hip to his parents’ plans to get him home so the first impression we get of Dickie (now Philippe but inexplicably still from America) is not of him as a mediocre though sincerely committed painter who spends much of his day lounging on the beach but in an invented scene of him fucking around with a blind beggar, teasing the man and offering an outrageous sum to buy his cane (knowing that the blind man needs it to find his way home.) In this scene, Ripley is the reasonable one, quickly brokering a relief of the tension between the pained beggar and Dickie the boisterous, back-slapping bully.
What’s more, we quickly find out that Dickie/Philippe is in on a scheme to defraud his parents of the $5,000 fee they promised Ripley for getting him to agree to come home. Participating in a deception of his parents is something the character in the novel never would’ve agreed to and the idea is to make him a little sleazy and a little unlikable right from the start, a contrast to the novel’s idle but morally forthright version of the character.
Additionally, Greenleaf has explicitly come to some kind of an agreement with Ripley about Ripley sponging off of him whereas in the novel that’s one of the main sources of tension in their relationship. It’s a complaint hanging over their interactions that’s never fully articulated, but it contributes to the souring of their relationship just as much as Marge’s accusation that Tom is likely queer so it looks bad for Dickie to be spending so much time with him.
In short, Philippe is a jerk. He’s a jerk who tosses Marge’s manuscript on Fra Angelico in the ocean. He’s a jerk who strands the thalassophic Ripley in a rowboat as punishment for disrupting his make-out session with Marge. He’s a jerk who can’t stop throwing his weight around, telling people to shut up for minor slights, acting the laughing bully when he’s bored. Every humiliating transgression of human decency is a prank, every moment that goes too far is a joke. He’s a jerk solely for the reason that Clément and Gégauff want you to be ok with it when Ripley suddenly plunges a knife into his chest.9
Naturally, this version of Greenleaf is a man’s man who paws at every piece of ass within grabbing distance; his dominant relationship with Marge being entirely unambiguous and therefore robbed of the symmetrical one-sided quality that her relationship with Dickie shares with Ripley and Dickie’s relationship in the novel. Instead of being about two pathetic outsiders vying for the attention of a decent, carefree man, the story is about a put-upon interloper coming between a rakish blowhard and his pouty French (sorry… extremely American) girlfriend.
Clément feels the need to make Ripley a man wronged, a guy who is slighted by Philippe’s sudden unwillingness to scam his own parents out of $5,000, a panicked schmuck caught in a row-boat and dying of heatstroke, a poor kid without a trust-fund accused of mooching by a fat-faced American who inherited a fortune. It’s all a strategy to get the viewer on his side, to render him palatable to an audience, to get us to root for Ripley via traditional means; Ripley as Vera Clouzot in Les Diaboliques, Ripley as Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, Ripley as any fundamentally mixed-up soul pushed too far by an insidiously domineering jerk.
But the logical reason to adapt a Ripley novel would be that you're interested in the character of Tom Ripley. Altering the plot to make it work as a film would be a given, but throwing out one of crime literature’s greatest characters makes no sense. Clément can’t wait to be rid of Ripley. The film’s most famous and least beloved alteration is to turn the story of the queerly queer Tom Ripley into a twisted heterosexual romance: Ripley and Marge begin the second half touring Naples, the film eases into its climax with Ripley tenderly kissing a sleeping Marge on her bare shoulder. Clément alters the plot to have Ripley’s ultimate goal be the seduction of Marge whereas Ripley’s condescending, repulsed antipathy for her defines their relationship in the book.
In the novel, it’s not just that Ripley dislikes Marge because of the ways in which she comes between him and Dickie or that he envies her relationship with Dickie, he finds her gross. He has a convulsive physical reaction to spying on Dickie holding her close and kissing her. An aspect of his performance of The One True Dickie Greenleaf is his projected notion of Greenleaf’s ideal taste in a partner, a projection that envisions a total rejection of Marge Sherwood and would unquestionably never include possessing her. In Purple Noon, Ripley wants to be Greenleaf in no small part so he can bed Marge.
Clément also fleetingly implies Greenleaf and Ripley have a weird history together, the idea hidden in the weirdness being something homosexual - Clément moves Greenleaf’s home from New York City to the gay-coded San Francisco and gives the duo a mysterious shared past that both men comment on but never explicate. It might be fair to say that Clément has entirely axed the homosexuality from the film and I’m reading too much into Philippe’s vague, dreamy-eyed elisions about The Real Story of Tom & Philippe but in either case, narratively, it’s less satisfying than the unambiguously brief friendship and one-sided obsession that characterizes Highsmith’s book.
If you believe the implied homosexuality is intentional, then the rearranging of their relationship is the kind of gesture intended to make Ripley’s murder of Greenleaf deeper and load it with more meaning but instead pushes everything towards predictability. It makes Ripley less deluded, more reasonable - the jilted lover archetype - but at the same time it plays like a drag on Greenleaf’s integrity, his secret homosexual past a knock against him. Maybe that’s the true Hitchcock connection: homosexuality as a tool for goosing the audience, a signifier of moral sickness denoting a villain, something squicky to gross them out with.
But like Mommy’s Boy Norman Bates, the accusation is at most an implication so even if you don’t catch it, Ripley is still the put-upon outsider refusing to be pushed any farther. This is what Truffaut means by pseudo-intellectual: an idiot’s version of gay subtext, a cowardly, ambiguous feint that won’t interfere with the film’s box office prospects, something to give academics to parse on their way to writing papers no one will ever read. One of the more fascinating aspects of Highsmith’s novel (Highsmith herself being a lesbian) is that while you probably couldn't accuse it of having sympathy for Ripley's pained queerness, neverthless its depiction of the burdens of homosexuality clearly come straight from her cold, black heart.10
Clément cast a young Alain Delon as Ripley and the role made him a star. But while Delon is a beautiful man, his screen presence is completely at odds with the books’ repeated insistence that Ripley was physically weak, an overt “sissy.” An essential characteristic of Ripley is that he’s queer11 in a way that’s subtle but slowly makes people uncomfortable. He can pass as straight but only for so long. He’s forced to hide himself but unable to do so convincingly forever - he’s a classic victim of the era’s homophobia in that way. He’s constantly called upon to explain his sexual identity but simply doesn’t want to deal with it - it’s another aspect of his essential self that’s just getting in his way.
The casting of the Delon seems designed to undercut Ripley’s queerness: he’s masculine and virile in an extremely traditional (French) fashion and all of the feinting at homosexuality is left up to Philippe, in any case. His sexuality is a non-issue insofar as he belongs more to the woman-obsessed creepy stalker archetype more than anything12 and all of the thorny queer elements of Highsmith’s story are repressed into the most subtextual of subtext. When Ripley tries on Greenleaf’s clothes in one of the novel and film’s most famous scenes, in Clément’s version he repeats lines from Philippe’s brusque “seduction” of Marge, the shift creating the subtle sensation that he'd like to be a powerful lady’s man like Philippe, rather than an ambiguous moment that splits the difference between “It'd be fun to try on my boyfriend’s clothes” and “I want to be someone else.”
In Highsmith’s conception, Ripley’s sexuality is a nuisance to him - it’s his itinerancy, his desire to escape even himself, that drives his behavior; Clément rightly reads the book as a kind of depraved travelogue and logically puts a focus on the scenery, the sky, the beach, crowded cafes and marketplaces, carriage rides, lavish hotel rooms, fine sailboats and cobblestone streets. It’s a film with an incredible sense of place, Henry Decaë’s alluring cinematography one of cinema’s most gorgeous sustained reveries.
But in the novel, Ripley’s touristic experiences are unsatisfying: it’s grey in Mongibello and the steps to the beach are irritatingly steep and exhausting, the iconic spots around Europe he imagined teeming with life and activity are lonely and empty, he can’t get into the Notre Dame cathedral on Christmas eve because of the crowds, “slimy” rain drizzles down nearly the whole time he’s in Venice, the food causes him to throw up. The book is about the conflict between expectation & experience, tourism being one of the better encapsulations of that conflict. Vacations rarely live up to what we expect. Being Dickie Greenleaf definitely doesn’t.
Clément, like Dickie Greenleaf, he can’t help but paint the skies too blue. The persistent overly blue horizons and tranquil open oceans of Purple Noon, as gorgeous as they are, play like hack-work, the kind of affect a mediocre artist resorts to in place of ideas. Ripley might have made a film about himself like Purple Noon but he’d have the taste to know it didn’t require any talent.
I’ll leave you with Truffaut writing on Clément, slightly repurposed: “Audiences who haven’t read [Highsmith’s] novel will find in [Mr. Ripley (sans Talent)] a brilliant and enjoyable film, but they won’t be able to measure the contrast in subtlety, intelligence, and, above all, in sensitivity that separates the novel from its adaptation. They won’t know that the filmmaker was tinkering with a masterpiece.”
"He knew it was a matter of mental suggestion, and that he had a hangover because he had intended to pretend that he had been drinking a great deal with Freddie. And now when there was no need of it, he was still pretending, uncontrollably."
