This adaptation of Highsmith's 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 is Tom Ripley, one of two young Americans on an extended idle in Italy. Offered $5000 by his companion's father to persuade him to return home, Ripley discovers hidden talents in himself-for murder, forgery, and impersonation. Clement captures Highsmith's sense of decadence that is merely the erasure, in plain day, of any pretense to morality. Connected to this is a confusion of nationality (French, American and Italian are all spoken interchangeably but not necessarily by the French, Americans or Italians) that so lends itself to a confusion of identity, and thus of motive. Like Wenders' An American Friend, as well as Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, two other Highsmith adaptations, Au Plein Soleil is a film about modern anonymity.