Purple Noon: The First, Sun-Drenched Ripley

The first thing to understand about Plein Soleil (1960) is that René Clément made a film noir and then refused to turn the lights off. Every convention of the form says this story belongs in rain, at night, under a streetlamp, in black and white. Clément shot it in colour, in Italy, in summer, on water, with the sun directly overhead. The French title means “full sun”. The English one, Purple Noon, keeps the idea and adds a bruise to it.

The gamble pays off because of what heat does to a lie. Darkness hides people; that is the entire architecture of noir, and it is also a kind of mercy. Clément’s sunlight offers no cover at all. His protagonist has to construct and maintain an elaborate deception in conditions where everything is visible, everyone is half-undressed, and there is nowhere to stand that is not lit. The film’s tension comes from watching a man improvise under a spotlight he cannot switch off.

The set-up

Tom Ripley has been sent to Italy by a rich American to bring his son Philippe home, on a modest fee and an expenses account. Philippe has no intention of going anywhere. He has a boat, a fiancée, an allowance and the Mediterranean, and he keeps Tom around the way you keep a dog that does tricks — useful, amusing, and never for a second an equal. Tom watches this life from eighteen inches away for weeks. Then he decides he would rather have it than be paid to end it.

That is Patricia Highsmith’s engine from her 1955 novel, and Clément and his co-writer Paul Gégauff keep it intact. What they change is the temperature. Highsmith’s Ripley is a creature of interiority — a man you inhabit, whose reasoning you follow so closely that his crimes feel procedural. Film cannot do interiority that way, so Clément externalises it into behaviour, and hands the behaviour to a 24-year-old.

Delon, and the problem of being beautiful

Alain Delon was essentially unknown when this was made, and Plein Soleil turned him into a star inside two hours. It is easy to see why and slightly harder to say what he is doing, because the performance works by subtraction. Delon plays Tom as someone permanently, minutely calibrating — reading the room, adjusting, matching. He is a mirror with ambition. When Philippe is cruel to him he absorbs it with a smile that arrives about a third of a second late, and that delay is the whole character.

The casting is also a joke the film never explains, and it is a good one. Delon is far better looking than anyone else on screen. The man playing the poor hanger-on, the nobody, the social parasite, is the most beautiful object in every frame he occupies. Clément lets this sit there unremarked, and it quietly corrodes the premise: Tom’s problem was never that he lacked what Philippe had in any visible sense. He lacked the money and the birth certificate. Everything else he could already do better.

There is a scene early on that tells you everything the film is going to do, and it happens long before anything criminal occurs. Tom, alone in Philippe’s room, puts on Philippe’s clothes and stands at the mirror doing Philippe’s voice — trying the life on, literally, while nobody is looking. He is caught. And the reaction is the point: Philippe is not frightened, or angry, or even especially interested. He is embarrassed for Tom. He treats the whole thing as a tasteless bit of theatre by a guest who has forgotten his place, and the humiliation is far more total than rage would have been. Rage would have conceded that Tom was a threat.

Clément stages it flatly, without menace, and the flatness is what makes it stick. A more nervous director would have scored it, held on Delon’s eyes, told us this was the seed. Clément throws it away, and it lodges. Watch the film a second time and that mirror is the only scene that matters.

Maurice Ronet’s Philippe is the film’s underrated performance, because the part is a trap. Play him as a monster and Tom becomes an avenger; play him as a saint and the film becomes sadism. Ronet finds the accurate register, which is careless. Philippe is not cruel on purpose. He is cruel the way weather is cruel — without noticing, because he has never once had to. Marie Laforêt’s Marge is stuck with a thinner role, and she does the most useful thing available: she plays someone who can tell something is wrong long before she can name it.

The craft: Decaë’s glare and Rota’s shrug

Henri Decaë shot this, and it is worth knowing what else he shot. He was Jean-Pierre Melville’s cinematographer — Bob le Flambeur before this, Le Samouraï seven years after, where he graded Paris down to slate and ash until the whole city looked like a held breath. The same eye made Plein Soleil. Decaë understood that the way to make sunlight frightening is to make it total: blow the highlights, bleach the whites, let the sea go to hammered metal, and give the audience no shadow to rest in. He shot on location, on real water, with real glare, and the film has a physical discomfort to it that a soundstage sun could never manufacture. You squint at this movie.

Nino Rota’s score does the other half. Rota was Fellini’s composer, and he brings the same instinct here: he declines to be sinister. The music is light, lilting, faintly Neapolitan, the sound of a holiday. It plays over things that are not holidays. The dissonance is never underlined, and it is far more unsettling than a stinger would be, because it suggests the world is simply going to carry on being pleasant regardless of what happens on this boat. Rota scores the sea, and the sea does not care.

The best sequence in the film is a market in Naples, where Tom moves through fish, ice, shouting and crowds — the one environment that is chaotic, tactile and completely indifferent to him. Clément uses it as relief and as threat at once. In a crowd this dense nobody is watching you. In a crowd this dense you also cannot control what anyone sees.

The bloodline

Highsmith’s Ripley has been filmed repeatedly, and the versions argue with each other in a way that makes a genuinely good triple bill. Wim Wenders got there next with The American Friend in 1977, casting Dennis Hopper and moving the character to Hamburg, jukebox and cowboy hat included — a Ripley who is already established, already rich, already bored. Anthony Minghella’s 1999 version went back to the novel’s structure and, crucially, to its ending.

Look sideways as well as forward. Clément’s real siblings are the Italian films of the same moment that turned the Mediterranean good life into a diagnosis, and the strain of Euro-crime that arrived a decade later with Bertolucci’s The Conformist, where beautiful surfaces are again the medium through which a man erases himself. Delon’s own trajectory runs straight from here to Melville’s monastic assassins, and the continuity is startling: the blank, watchful, faintly dead-eyed quality that Melville would build a cathedral around was already fully present at 24, in swimming trunks.

The case against

Clément blinks. The film’s final movement takes a decision that Highsmith never asked for and would not have written, and it costs the picture some of its nerve. Highsmith reportedly admired Delon’s Ripley enormously and objected to where Clément leaves him — a disagreement worth having, because the two versions are arguing about whether the story is a thriller or a portrait. The film is also, for a Highsmith adaptation, oddly incurious about class. The novel is soaked in the specific American anxiety of not having gone to the right school. Clément trades that for glamour, and glamour is a poorer subject.

Where to find it

Restored, widely available on disc from the boutique labels, and a fixture on the arthouse platforms. Watch it in summer, in the afternoon, with the curtains open. The film is built for it.

Spoilers below

Tom kills Philippe on the boat, in daylight, on open water, and Clément stages it as a squalid domestic argument that gets out of hand rather than as a set piece. There is no crescendo. Two men who have been needling each other for an hour finally do the thing, and then one of them has a body and a very small deck and a great deal of sea.

What follows is the film’s finest stretch and the most Highsmith thing in it: the admin. Tom has to wrap, weight and dispose of a corpse alone, in the sun, while the boat moves, and Clément films it as manual labour — awkward, heavy, and repeatedly interrupted by the physics of a small vessel. Then comes the impersonation, and here Delon is extraordinary. The passport photo, the typewriter, the signature practised over and over, the voice adjusted on hotel telephones. Tom does not become Philippe in a transformation scene. He becomes him through paperwork, one forged document at a time, and the film’s real thesis lands: identity is a clerical achievement.

The ending is Clément’s break with Highsmith, and it is a genuine loss dressed as a beautiful shot. Marge sells the boat. Tom, on a deckchair in the sun, is told he has a phone call, and behind him — out of his sightline, entirely without his knowledge — the boat is winched up and the thing tied beneath it comes clear of the water. He walks up the beach toward the camera, radiant, wearing the smile of a man who has won. The last image is of a person receiving good news at the exact instant the world stops being survivable.

It is superbly executed and it is a compromise. Highsmith’s ending lets Tom get away with it, and the horror of the novel lives precisely there: no propeller, no reckoning, just a man who did this and then went on to have a pleasant life. Clément gives us the propeller because 1960 required a propeller. He earns the shot. He also, in the last thirty seconds, converts a portrait of a man with no floor beneath him into a story about a criminal who was caught — and those are not the same film. Minghella, forty years later, understood what had been traded away and traded it back.