René Clément's adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's murder thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley, set in Italy, is a dazzling, full-sun, full-color, thoroughly nasty film noir ("like a big hairy spider crawling slowly across a travel poster"-Time). Alain Delon, who would become Jean-Pierre Melville's "lethal angel," as David Thomson called him, here rehearses a rather more energetic sort of corruption based on pure cynicism. His Tom Ripley is one of two young Americans on an extended idle. 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 (now dead) friend. Clément captures the Highsmith sense of decadence that is merely the erasure, in plain day, of any pretense to morality, or identity. Like Wenders's The American Friend, as well as Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, both based on Highsmith, Purple Noon is a film about modern anonymity.