EVERYONE IS GUILTY: PATRICIA HIGHSMITH ADAPTATIONS
“I am not a whore, that’s just an expression. I’m an artist who paints with blood.” - Patricia Highsmith
Films in this Program
Alfred Hitchcock
101 minutes
Young socialite Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) has come up with a plan to take care of his hated father once and for all, and when he meets tennis pro Guy Haines (Farley Granger) he thinks he has the means to carry it out. The pitch is simple: If Guy takes care of Bruno's father then Bruno will kill Guy's wife, Miriam (Kasey Rogers), who happens to be standing in the way of a new marriage to a senator's daughter. With no clear motive for either murder, Guy and Bruno will get off scot free and their lives will be improved for their trouble. Guy, of course, rejects the plan, and the two go their separate ways. When Bruno unilaterally sets the plan in motion, Guy learns that the path to happiness and normalcy can (or must?) overlap with that of sadism and guilt.
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN is an expertly-constructed, white-knuckle plunge into fate, coincidence and psychopathology – favorite themes of noir writer Patricia Highsmith, whose novel was adapted here for the screen by Raymond Chandler and realized by the master himself, Alfred Hitchcock.
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN is an expertly-constructed, white-knuckle plunge into fate, coincidence and psychopathology – favorite themes of noir writer Patricia Highsmith, whose novel was adapted here for the screen by Raymond Chandler and realized by the master himself, Alfred Hitchcock.
René Clément
115 minutes
Alain Delon was at his most impossibly beautiful when PURPLE NOON was released and made him an instant star. This ripe, colorful adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s vicious novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, directed by the versatile René Clément, stars Delon as Tom Ripley, a duplicitous American charmer in Rome on a mission to bring his privileged, devil-may-care acquaintance Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet) back to the United States. What initially seems a carefree tale of friendship soon morphs into a thrilling saga of seduction, identity theft, and murder. Featuring gorgeous location photography of coastal Italy, PURPLE NOON is crafted with a light touch that allows it to be at once suspenseful and erotic, and it gave Delon the role of a lifetime.
Wim Wenders
127 minutes
Wim Wenders pays loving homage to rough-and-tumble Hollywood film noir with THE AMERICAN FRIEND, a loose adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel Ripley’s Game. Dennis Hopper oozes quirky menace as an amoral American art dealer who entangles a terminally ill German everyman, played by Bruno Ganz, in a seedy criminal underworld as revenge for a personal slight — but when the two become embroiled in an ever-deepening murder plot, they form an unlikely bond. Filmed on location in Hamburg and Paris, with some scenes shot in grimy, late-seventies New York City, Wenders’s international breakout is a stripped-down crime story that mixes West German and American film flavors, and it features cameos by filmmakers Jean Eustache, Samuel Fuller, and Nicholas Ray.
Anthony Minghella
139 minutes
There’s a glowering darkness at the heart of Minghella’s sun-kissed, classically polished continental thriller, working from the same source material as PURPLE NOON (1960), but bringing the homoerotic subtext to the fore. Here, Matt Damon’s Ripley lucks into a passport to the continental high life (and unrequited love) with epicurean rich kid Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), though Philip Seymour Hoffman smells something funny. Acutely aware of how class, money and sex shape desire and resentment, THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY also plunges into the nebulous distinctions between presenting a façade to the world, outright pretense and the more radical practice of reinventing oneself.
"How's the peeping, Tommy?"
"How's the peeping, Tommy?"
