(Swans - January 28, 2008) Well-read Americans might not be familiar
with the name Patricia Highsmith. At least this was the case for me
before I stumbled across the movie Ripley’s Game on the IFC cable
channel a couple of years ago.
Directed by Liliana Cavani and starring John Malkovich as Tom Ripley, a
professional thief, it was quite unlike anything I had ever seen.
Ripley, an American émigré living in rural France, pressures Jonathan
Trevanny, a British frame shop owner in the local village who has never
committed a crime in his life, to carry out a series of hits on Ripley’s
enemies in the Italian mafia. Since Trevanny is suffering from leukemia,
Ripley reasons that he would be amenable to killing complete strangers
for a handsome fee in order to help meet family expenses after his
death. Ripley has another motive in recruiting Trevanny. At the start of
the movie, Ripley overhears Trevanny describing his estate as typically
nouveau riche and out of character with the French countryside. Further
study on my part would reveal that the Ripley films, and the nonpareil
novels they are based on, nearly always involve such class resentments
at their core.
Eventually I discovered that Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game also provided the
narrative for Wim Wenders’s The American Friend that featured Dennis
Hopper as Tom Ripley and Bruno Ganz as the frame-maker Jonathan
Zimmermann (a Germanized character in keeping with the film’s relocation
to Rotterdam from rural France). Wenders took some liberties with
Highsmith’s novels that are not quite successful in my view. The Ripley
character seems more in keeping with Dennis Hopper’s public image rather
than the fictional character. With a cowboy hat lodged permanently on
his head, Hopper’s Ripley is much more macho than Highsmith’s character,
whose epicene malevolence is rendered far more successfully in Cavani’s
movie.
Since Ripley’s Game was such an outstanding film, I was persuaded soon
afterwards to watch The Talented Mr. Ripley, based on a much younger Tom
Ripley’s introduction to the criminal world. Starring Matt Damon as the
title character, it involves Ripley’s introduction to the world of the
haute bourgeoisie. Hired by a shipping magnate to persuade his playboy
son to return home to America from Italy, Tom Ripley allows himself to
become the son’s paid companion in a relationship that has strong
homoerotic implications, another theme that is omnipresent in
Highsmith’s novels. When Tom Ripley learns that Dickie Greenleaf, the
boating heir, has plans to dump him, he murders him and assumes his
identity. Damon, like Malkovich, is adept at capturing the utterly
cynical and amoral psyche of this most intriguing character.
As so often happens with excellent movies like Ripley’s Game, I make an
effort to read the novel upon which the screenplay is based in order to
find out more about the author. Eventually I discovered that Highsmith’s
novels have inspired some of the finest movies over the past 50 years
including her first, which provided the scenario for Alfred Hitchcock’s
Strangers on a Train. Like the Ripley novels, Strangers on a Train
involves homoerotic themes and a penetrating study of the lifestyles of
the rich and infamous. Unlike the movies, however, the novels are
blessed by Highsmith’s narrative voice, which is an utterly distinct one
as demonstrated by this excerpt from Strangers on a Train.
"That evening, Charles Anthony Bruno was lying on his back in an El Paso
hotel room, trying to balance a gold fountain pen across his rather
delicate, dished-in nose. He was too restless to go to bed, not
energetic enough to go down to one of the bars in the neighborhood and
look things over. He had looked things over all afternoon, and he did
not think much of them in El Paso. He did not think much of the Grand
Canyon either. He thought more of the idea that had come to him night
before last on the train. A pity Guy hadn’t awakened him that morning.
Not that Guy was the kind of fellow to plan a murder with, but he liked
him, as a person. Guy was somebody worth knowing. Besides, Guy had left
his book, and he could have given it back."
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/the-crime-novels-of-patricia-highsmith/
