Purple Noon (DVD)
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.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- New digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- New interview with René Clément scholar and author Denitza Bantcheva
- Archival interviews with actor Alain Delon and novelist Patricia Highsmith, on whose book The Talented Mr. Ripley the film is based
- Original English-language trailer
- PLUS: A new essay by film critic Geoffrey O’Brien and excerpts from a 1981 interview with Clément
New cover by Michael Boland