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:

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Donald Westlake, who died New Year's Eve, at the age 0f 75, while vacationing in Mexico, was best known as a "crime writer", and in that capacity he won three Edgar Awards (including one for Best Screenplay for his adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Grifters, directed by Stephen Frears in 1990) and was honored by the Mystery Writers of America with the title of Grand Master. But such tributes barely hint at Westlake's stature as a supreme, all-around entertainer with a wide range within his chosen specialty. After publishing his first novel, The Mercenaries, in 1960, Westlake established such a steady rate of production that, in addition to the many books he published under his own name, he also adopted more than ten pseudonyms, partly to deflect criticism of him for overtaxing the marketplace. (He may have also had other, personal reasons, for sticking the name "John B. Allan" on the 1961 book Elizabeth Taylor: A Fascinating Story of America's Most Talented Actress and the World's Most Beautiful Woman and other pseudonyms on the pulp porn novels he wrote in the 1950s and 1960s, some of them in collaboration with Lawrence Block, which have titles such as Sin Sucker and Campus Tramp.) Westlake also matched certain pseuds up with recurring characters, for instance writing a string of mysteries about a character named Mitch Tobin under the name "Tucker Coe".

His best-known alter ego was Richard Stark, who, starting with 1962's The Hunter, wrote more than twenty taut, mean thrillers about Parker, a cooled-out, super-efficient sociopath of a professional thief. Under his own name, Westlake wrote, among other titles, the John Dortmunder series, detailing the often hilarious adventures of an intelligent, hard-working, frequently put-upon crook with a knack for gaudily designed heists that tended to run into equally gaudy complications. (The series began with 1972's The Hit Rock, which he said began as a Parker novel; he realized that he needed to concoct a new hero for it when the plot started turning funny on him.)

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NEW YORK: "The French Crime Wave: Film Noir Thrillers, 1937-2000" at Film Forum, runs August 8 through September 11. The programmers' definition of "thrillers" is pretty loose: it includes not just Henri-Georges Clouzot's great existential nailbiter The Wages of Fear but Robert Besson's existential and ascetic Pickpocket and A Man Escaped, as well as the pure horror poetry of Eyes without a Face. But then the French do take their crime literature seriously. One of the charms of the schedule is the chance to see what the work of a number of famous thriller writers--including Jim Thompson (whose Pop. 1280 and A Hell of a Woman provided the basis for, respectively. Bertrand Tavernier's Clean Slate and Alain Corenau's Serie Noire), Patricia Highsmith (whose The Talented Mr. Ripley was turned into Rene Clement's Purple Noon), and Cornell Woolrich (Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid) looked like after a pass through the French film hopper.

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Like a handful of the better noir and pulp writers, Patricia Highsmith has undergone a bit of a positive critical reappraisal of late, although one has to wonder if critics and casual fans are more interested in her actual writing than her bisexuality, alcoholism and often-controversial personal life.  Whatever the case, the rediscovery of Highsmith's books in recent years was followed by a spate of interest in adapting her works for film.  Naturally, the most attention was focused on the so-called "Ripliad", her series of novels featuring the amoral, cynical trickster and killer Tom Ripley; while 2002's Ripley's Game, bouyed by a tremendous performance in the lead role by John Malkovich, was the better film, 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley got far more attention and made far more money.  This was thanks largely to a successful marketing campaign, a coincidental tapping of the zeitgeist, and the fact that several of its stars were at their peak of popularity.  There have been other Ripleys (Highsmith herself loved Alain Delon in Rene Clement's Purple Noon) and other filmed versions of Ripliad novels (Wim Wenders made a memorable, if confused, version of Ripley's Game as The American Friend in 1977), but none has stayed in the public consciousness as the one that teamed the recently deceased Anthony Minghella with Matt Damon.

In most ways, The Talented Mr. Ripley is the best of the Ripley novels, and one of Patricia Highsmith's best novels overall.  It was the purest expression of her fascination with anti-heroic figures who carried around a silent delight in their defiance of law and propriety; it also featured some of her most coolly murderous prose, the quality of her writing that critics most admire.  Her deliberate, incisive writing seemed almost subversive at times, so plainly and nastily could she capture those who circumvented decent society.  But it was not without its flaws, most noticably her writing of female characters:  Highsmith seemed either incapable of writing female characters as deep and dark as her male characters, or uninterested in doing so.  Anthony Minghella's filmed version, with a solid cast and a big budget, had a chance to to capture all the strengths of the book while addressing its weaknesses.

WHAT IT HAD: Minghella was riding a peak of success at the time The Talented Mr. Ripley was filmed, having won widespread popular and critical acclaim with his previous movie, The English Patient.  His lead actors were equally hot:  Matt Damon was as popular as he'd ever be, as was co-star Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jude Law was enjoying some level of success in the U.S. for the first time.  Cate Blanchett scored a key role that helped launch her big-screen career, and Minghella staffed the picture with solid character actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Philip Baker Hall in supporting roles.  It's also a gorgeous film, with breathtaking locations, beautiful cinematography (by John Seale) and stellar set design and period costumes.  Whatever its flaws, Ripley takes no shorts with its look and feel.

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