Rene Clement's adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's murder thriller, “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” set in Italy, is a dazzlingly bright, full-sun, full-color, thoroughly nasty film noir (“like a big hairy spider crawling slowly across a travel poster”--Time). Alain Delon plays Tom Ripley, one of two young Americans on an extended idle in Italy. Offered $5000 by his companion Philippe's father to persuade Philippe to return home, Tom discovers that the task is impossible. However the fire is kindled under his lust for Philippe's money and mistress, bringing to the fore hidden talents in Ripley - for murder, forgery, impersonation of his best (now dead) friend...and for the most intricate of machinations which keep the viewer engrossed in this spider for nearly two hours.
Clement captures the Highsmith sense of decadence that is merely the erasure, in plain day, of any pretense to morality. Connected to this is the confusion of national identity (“Some of the Americans (in the film) speak French in good French accents, others speak French in bad French accents, still others speak American. The Italians sometimes speak French.... The subtitles, luckily, are in English” --Variety) that so lends itself to a confusion of identity, period, and thus of motive. Like Wenders' The American Friend (as well as Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, also based on a Highsmith novel), Au Plein Soleil is a film about modern anonymity. (JB)