We finally saw Purple Noon (Plein Soleil), the first film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, in a dubbed VHS version. There are enough surprising plot changes to make it worth watching even if you think you already know the story, but nevertheless I think Minghella's version beat the pants off it. Purple Noon's Ripley gets the self-serving sociopathic part right but entirely leaves out the insecurity and self-consciousness that make Highsmith's and Minghella's Ripley an interesting character.
Ripley's other psychologically complex feature is his struggle with what another era would have called his "latent homosexuality". In Purple Noon it stays latent, but barely; the packaging sports a passionate heterosexual embrace but the movie camera mostly lingers on male torsoes, and the French Marge is a whiny bore with no chemistry at all. And yet the struggle between Tom and Phillip is about money, not the crime of passion that the other tellings of the Ripley story hinge on.
What is fun about Purple Noon is watching these French actors pretend to be American. It probably would be even more of a hoot if it weren't dubbed. It emphasizes the yachting, the interior decoration and the clothes over the bohemianism of the Tom-Phillip-Marge-Freddy set. Try as I might, I can't stop thinking the ungracious word "Eurotrash". (I wonder what equally nasty Continental slang there is for American layabouts in Europe?)
In other movie news, Minority Report is not a bad sci-fi noir (after so many disastrous attempts to wed the genres) and finally something watchable from the overrated Mr. Spielberg. But you all saw it before me so I needn't say any more.