The New York Times recently noted that this year marks the eightieth birthday of Tom Ripley, the favorite antihero of the late novelist Patricia Highsmith, who between The Talented Mr. Ripley (which was written in 1954, and in which Tom was 25 years old) and 1991's Ripley Under Water (published four years before Highsmith's death) wrote five books about him. Highsmith's Ripley is good-looking, well-built, implicitly gay but basically asexual, beyond suave, and sociopathic. When first glimpsed in The Talented Mr. Ripley, he's scuffling out a grifter's existence in New York before being drafted by the rich parents of a distant acquaintance, Dickie Greenleaf, to go to Italy and drag their slumming son back to the States. Instead, Ripley insinuates himself into Dickie's life, kills him, and essentially takes his place. He remains an American expatriate in Europe, where he uses his refined eye to become a formidable figure in the art forgery business.
Highsmith adored her creation. Ripley may be without conscience, but he has his own bizarre code, and he isn't casually murderous--he kills only as a last resort, though that's probably because dead bodies make for a mess. In some ways, Highsmith was the Ayn Rand of misanthropic hard-boiled crime novelists, and she seems to have judged Ripley as a superior sort of creature: he deserved to go undetected and live high on the spoils of his crimes so long as he was wittier, smarter, and had better taste than his victims. Highsmith's genius for plotting and nasty twists made her attractive to Hollywood, but her sensibility was too twisted and nasty for most mainstream filmmakers. One of Hitchcock's best movies, Strangers on a Train, is based on one of her non-Ripley novels, but in the movie, the hero, Guy, is horrified to discover that Bruno, the flirty psycho he met by chance has murdered Guy's estranged wife as a favor to him and now expects Guy to return the favor by murdering Bruno's father. In the novel, Guy is reluctant to fulfill his half of the bargain, but he gets over it. Likewise, there have been five movies made so far based on the Ripley novels--including the most recent, Roger Spottiswoode's 2005 Ripley Under Ground with Barry Pepper, which has yet to see either a theatrical or DVD release in the U.S. How have filmmakers succeeded in their attempts to bring Highsmith's hero to the movies? The results are all over the map:
PURPLE NOON (1960), directed by René Clément and based on The Talented Mr. Ripley, probably remains the purest expression of Highsmith's sensibility to make it to the screen. Shot by Henri Decaë and with a score by Nino Rota, it has a distinctive feel that's both lush and chilly. The movie made an international star of its Ripley, Alain Delon, and Highsmith was publicly approving of the actor as a proper physical match for her character. Purple Noon came out at a time when Americans were used to going to see European movies such as La Dolce Vita and La Notte for the spectacle of glamorous people behaving badly in photogenic locations, and Purple Noon fit right in with that trend, though in keeping with Highsmith's vision, it isn't obviously moralistic. But if you know the novel, you can spot the places where Highsmith's viewpoint has been softened a little: Philippe (nee' Dickie) Greenleaf isn't such an ass that you can think he has it coming to him, and Ripley actually gets caught at the end. That never happened in the books, and it hasn't happened in the movies since.
THE AMERICAN FRIEND (1977): The German director Wim Wenders made this version of the third book in the series, Ripley's Game. In some ways, it's the smartest and richest of all these films, though it also has the sorriest Ripley, hands down: Dennis Hopper, then deep into his drug-fueled freak-of-the-week period. Hopper was either unaware of or indifferent to the whole notion that his character was meant to seem classy enough to pass through the rarefied circles in which he did his business without setting off alarm bells. It's supposed to be a major insult when an art restorer--Jonathan, played by Bruno Ganz--who has heard rumors that Ripley is a shady character declines to shake his hand, but Hopper looks and acts like somebody who should be used to getting driven away from people's establishments at the wrong end of a fire hose. The plot here turns on that strange ethical code of Ripley's: as payback for the insult of the unshaken hand, he sets the wheels in motion that result in Jonathan, who is sick and in need of money, being hired to perform a contract killing. But then the contractor wants Jonathan to perform a second murder, and Ripley, who sees that as out of line, joins forces with Jonathan, first to help him pull off the follow-up killing and then to face off against the murdered man's vengeful associates. Hopper may have been hired not so much because he might be right for the part as for his status as the director of Easy Rider and the film maudit The Last Movie; having a little fun with the casting, Wenders filled many of the roles that called for gangsters and other untrustworthy types with fellow directors, including Nicholas Ray, Jean Eustache, Peter Lilienthal, Daniel Schmid, and Samuel Fuller. In fact, the best performance in the movie is given by Fuller, as a cigar-chomping Mafia boss toting a gun whose barrel is about half as long as he is tall.
THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1999): This second go at Ripley's debut boasts strong performances, especially by Matt Damon as Ripley, Jude Law as Dickie, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Freddie Miles, one of the few characters who managed to drive Ripley to overcome his natural aversion to commit murder. Directed by Anthony Minghella, it's a handsome production, and very impressive on its own terms. It's just that those terms are a flat contradiction of Highsmith's. Minghella and company set out to explain Ripley psychologically by emphasizing his inner struggle over his sexuality and the terrible loneliness he feels, which the mercurial, snobbish Dickie exacerbates by first appearing to accept him as a brother and then coldly shutting him out. Ripley here isn't a natural aristocrat rising to his true level but a frightened child in need of a hug, and the murders he commits aren't cold-blooded chess moves but the desperate acts of a cornered animal. The movie ends with him commiting one more murder (that isn't in the book) that leaves him lonelier, more miserable, and weepier than ever. Maybe the filmmakers thought they were making him more sympathetic. Highsmith, who thought her Ripley was already better than sympathetic because he was fascinating, would have wanted to put this crybaby out of her misery with a champagne bottle upside his head.
RIPLEY'S GAME (2002): This little-seen version of the same novel that inspired The American Friend was directed by Liliana Cavani, an Italian filmmaker best known for the godawful Nazi porn fantasy The Night Porter (1974). It doesn't have the brilliant conceits that decorated the Wenders film, or the atmosphere that enriched it, either. What it does have is John Malkovich as the Ripley of a Highsmith fan's dreams: he may not be the eye candy that Alain Delon was in his prime, but he's certainly convincing as an American who's exiled himself partly out of a sense that he's better than his home country deserves. The movie, which also features Ray Winstone, Lena Headey, and Dougray Scott as the accidental assassin, is a straightforward treatment of the story, and the story is a good one. But the best reason for its existence is that it gives Malkovich a chance to preen. At the climax, with a carload of Mafia killers on the way to his Italian villa, he carefully arranges his various death traps and then settles in for a night and a morning of waiting. It's like watching the last reel of Straw Dogs if the Dustin Hoffman character had been played by HAL 9000.
