Delon’s star-making turn draws us into a tricky narrative about an even trickier trickster, as themes of impersonation and immorality are explored in this elegant adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’. 

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The film that made Alain Delon a star and turned him into a household name in the ‘60s, Purple Noon is one of those pleasurable films about a bad guy with ulterior motives whom we would find ourselves rooting for. 

We have to thank Patricia Highsmith of course, whose popular 1955 novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley” romanticised a criminal with the requisite brains to outsmart those around him. 

With Purple Noon, the versatile French director Rene Clement (best known also for 1952’s Forbidden Games) draws us into a tricky narrative about an even trickier trickster. 

Delon is Tom Ripley, charming but chameleon-like in his ability to adopt the identity of an acquaintance, right down to even learning how to forge the latter’s signature and wooing his girl.  Sick of a world in which he is merely a passenger, Tom longs for the good life and strives to attain it in any way possible. 

“I might not look it, but I’ve got lots of imagination.”

Even the prospect of murder is not beyond him, and so Purple Noon, with Clement’s heightened focus on realism, becomes not just an intriguing screen adaptation about impersonation and immorality but also a criminal ‘procedural’ showing the nuts and bolts of how an elaborate crime and its associated evidence can be taken care of. 

Shot mainly in Naples and Rome, Purple Noon is as bright as the sun in the sky.  There is no need for a dark, brooding atmosphere when Tom’s intuition, at times ingenious, lights up the spaces that he’s in, be it a hotel room or on a boat. 

Punctuated by moments of suspense that would not go amiss in a Hitchcock picture, the film also contains some scenes shot in the sea that remind a bit of the much later Jaws (1975). 

Grade: A-

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