WATCH PARTY: Purple Noon (1960) directed by René Clément @ Mary Pretlow Library

We'll be in the big room, Meeting Room 1, to the right of the entrance in Mary Pretlow Library.

RUNTIME: 118 minutes

SYNOPSIS (via Criterion.com): 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.

BLURBS:
"Delon is terrifically good in the role: his almost unearthly perfection is creepy itself, as if he is imitating a human being." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

"Purple Noon positively seethes with barely controlled passions, murder, intrigue, debauch. ... Juxtaposing Tom's mad desires with the beauty of the Italian countryside, Clément reaches peaks of distress few films have since matched." - Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle

"The movie has the conviction of a dream in which everything that happens seems both necessary and unprepared for. Cleverly understanding that his only source of superiority over Highsmith lies in film’s visual quality, Clément has made his movie incredibly lovely, and in fact has employed this loveliness to detach us from our usual moral foundations." - Wendy Lesser, Library of America