Showing posts with label Patricia Highsmith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Patricia Highsmith. Show all posts

Thursday 26 November 2020

Rene Clement: On Adapting Patricia Highsmith

Purple Noon (Directed by Rene Clement)

Rene Clément isn't as well known as some of his contemporaries. Because he was too young to be directly comparable to the lyrical realism of Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné, and was born too early to stand alongside Nouvelle Vague directors such as François Truffaut. As a result, his reputation has maybe suffered.

He made his debut movie in 1936, Soigne tonne gauche (Watch Your Right), a 13-minute short made to showcase the emerging talent of Jacques Tati. Clément continued making short films, but then transitioned to documentaries. Within the next eight years, he made ten documentaries with a socialist perspective and marked by a humanist outlook. 

The feature La Bataille du rail (1946), which commemorated the actions of French Resistance fighters, was notable for its lack of emotion and a raw, stripped-down approach to storytelling, winning Clement the Best Director award at the first Cannes Film Festival. 

This was followed by Le Père Tranquille (also released in 1946), a movie starring comedian Noël-Noël as a secret agent with a rebellious son. Later came Les Maudits (1947), about a gang of Nazis attempting to escape Germany in a submarine, followed by memorable works such as Forbidden Games (Jeux interdits) in 1952, and the 1963 film Le Jour et l'heure starring Simone Signoret."Is Paris Burning?" followed in 1966. 

Forbidden Games is regarded as Clement’s best film, a gritty, unsentimental portrayal of a family's attempts to deal with the loss of two sons by building a cemetery in an abandoned barn. Forbidden Games was awarded the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Brigitte Fossey's impressive performance in the leading part highlights another facet of Clement's abilities: he had a tremendous aptitude for working with actors.

Plein Soleil (Purple Noon) is Rene Clement’s 1960 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s first Ripley novel,  The Talented Mr Ripley, starring a young Alain Delon as Tom Ripley.

The following is excerpted from an interview with Rene Clement that originally appeared in the February 1, 1981, issue of L’avant-scène: Cinéma. It was conducted by Olivier Eyquem and Jean-Claude Missiaen and translated for the Criterion release of the film by Nicholas Elliott.

How did you first encounter Patricia Highsmith’s novel?

[Actor] France Roche had told me about it first, but I hadn’t had the time to take a serious look at it. Then [producer] Robert Hakim brought me the book and asked me if I was interested in adapting it. That’s where everything started. I was immediately attracted to the novel’s ambiguity and feeling of uneasiness, which are constants in Highsmith’s work. Those who try to cultivate ambiguity in the thriller genre don’t always succeed, but Highsmith achieves something quite deep and genuinely successful. I thought I would work with [Jean] Aurenche and [Pierre] Bost, my usual collaborators, but Hakim dragged his feet. He had just produced À double tour, adapted by Paul Gégauff, and, possibly wanting to coast on the New Wave’s popularity, he suggested I work with him.

Gégauff was a good choice, especially for the first part of the film.

At first, I worked with two scriptwriters who didn’t provide very fruitful results. In the meantime, I found the film’s denouement by myself. Gégauff is a very sharp man, whom I greatly appreciated. We pulled off all sorts of acrobatics to make the action unfold more believably. We were a little rushed toward the end, but Hakim, who is an intelligent, efficient man with an admirable knowledge of his trade, proved very understanding. He said some extremely sensible and positive things about the work we had accomplished.

We started shooting, but I was missing certain scenes. So there was a certain amount of improvisation during the shoot, notably for the episode of Greenleaf’s death, which came out of circumstances I tried to make the most of, and for the seduction of Marge, which I wrote on set during the lunch break, because I could ‘feel’ [Alain] Delon and [Marie] Laforêt and knew what they were each capable of. Cocteau used to tell me: ‘You always have to be ready for the unexpected.’ You shouldn’t refuse to shoot because it hasn’t been set down in writing; you have to move forward. Paper and writing are very cut-and-dried. A script is like a score that is missing any indication of tempo. You have to breathe life into it. It demands an element of improvisation.


Patricia Highsmith appears indifferent to material plausibility and the actual details of Ripley’s scheme. Ripley practicing Greenleaf’s signature takes up about twenty shots in the film, while it is disposed of in a single sentence in Highsmith’s novel.

In that regard, the novel was completely indefensible. It was very difficult to adapt, and we were only able to find satisfactory solutions by taking liberties. In my opinion, a director must always prove what he puts forward. A writer can allow himself to say that a woman is incredibly beautiful, that she has delicate features and that her eyes are uniquely gentle. But as a director, I have to show her and ask myself who will play her. I can’t just dream anything up. If a sequence has two or three elements that crucially determine the action but are simply unbelievable, I can’t say, ‘Did you see that? It’s unbelievable!’ The script has to make them plausible. If you look closely at the adaptation of Purple Noon, you will see our efforts in that direction.

Carrying over the ambiguity of the character of Ripley meant giving him a physical reality, in such a way that the sensations he experienced – his fear, his sweat – were constantly on-screen.

That is a game played in collaboration with the actor. After Alain killed the fat American, Freddy, I told him, ‘You shouldn’t have killed him. Figure it out – it’s your business now . . . Oh, if you had been more intelligent, you would have kept Freddy at bay, you would have seized another opportunity. But you didn’t premeditate anything, you’re not a real criminal, and you’re stuck. Forget the rest of the script – it’s up to you now. Get him down the stairs or you’ll go to jail.’ But a corpse is heavy, and you don’t dispose of it as easily as in a novel; Delon had a hell of a time. As for me, I was there to film Ripley’s suffering. That was the game we were playing together, and that’s the attitude you should have when you really love what you’re doing and you respect the people with whom you’re working.

The signatures scene in the hotel seems to have been extraordinarily minutely prepared. Had you written everything, down to the smallest gesture?

No, you can’t get all those details down in a script; that’s part of the creation. There are ten thousand ways of approaching a script. For instance, imagine illustrating the following action: ‘The man is at the window. He turns around, sits down. A woman enters.’ Some filmmakers – note that I say ‘filmmakers,’ not ‘directors’ – stick to the syntactic basics. But a director knows that when the man sits down, the cushion he rests on will rise up in a certain manner, and that through the crack we will discover something strange, etc. But he can’t put all that down in writing. He would wind up with a three-hundred-page novel. Would it make any sense to describe it? Would there be any hope of recapturing it on set? We ridicule directors who maniacally try to realize the images they carry in their minds, who stamp their feet and make a scene if the car passing in the background isn’t the right color. But maybe that color really does have its importance. How do you make a crew search your fantasies to find the exact reasons to reproduce what you more or less clearly imagined?


Should the director keep things a little mysterious for his crew?

Absolutely not. On the contrary! Your crew should know as much as possible about what you are trying to achieve. It must be with you. It would be illogical to leave your collaborators in the dark. Enthusiasm is born of shared work. The important thing is to know what you want. And to remain flexible so you can bring to life that entire part of the mise-en-scène that cannot be set down in writing, bring back to life the memories you carry. For instance, Ripley devouring a peach immediately after Greenleaf’s death, or eating a chicken after murdering Freddy – those incidents come from my memories of police reports I had read years earlier. I remembered that many policemen observed a type of bulimia among murderers after their crimes. A little like the banquets that follow funerals: life’s revenge over death. These memories reemerged, and I made Delon eat like a feline in the apartment scene; he shelters himself from the camera, he hides. That seemed very interesting to me.

We never really learn about Ripley’s past. The shot of the children dancing in a circle is one of the few moments where we can guess at it. It is like a rush of innocence rising up in a very nostalgic manner.

By having Ripley watch the children turning on the sidewalk, I mostly wanted to show that life went on while this horrible thing took place. It’s like the spider we see before the railroader’s execution in La bataille du rail. It is more important than this man sentenced to the firing squad, who is already nothing. And he isn’t even dead yet, while the spider ambles about freely, accountable to no one. And here, see these children enjoying themselves, dancing in a circle, far from this tragic event, safe in their own world . . . But it’s true, we don’t know Ripley’s past. In fact, it is very ambiguous; when Marge tries to find out about him, Greenleaf pretends not to know him. I don’t believe Greenleaf, but what I like is that neither he nor Ripley told me everything. I like that. Julien Green once told me, ‘I started one of my novels with a really important character who was supposed to be the main thread, but at a certain point, he played a dirty trick on me: he took off, leaving me there with a young woman and a rather elderly gentleman whom I did not know.’ ‘Well?’ I asked him. ‘Well, what do you want? I kept talking with them.’ I like the attitude of being somewhat led by your characters, because it seems to me to provide a guarantee of authenticity. And in this case, when Greenleaf says, ‘I’ve never seen him in my life,’ I ask myself, Hmm, why isn’t he telling me the truth? It would seem so simple to make up another story. But Marge is referring to his own childhood, which is probably what bothers him.


There is a fascinating aspect of Ripley’s character that we also find in Highsmith’s novel. What I would call his ‘sponge’ side. Ripley moves in a certain social context upon which he models himself, and absorbs everything about it. He has to make those he encounters love him.

The secret is Dostoyevsky. That’s where I went looking when I was adapting Purple Noon, particularly in The Insulted and Humiliated. Purple Noon is the story of a dreadful character who has killed two people, tried to steal, and attempted to seduce a young woman to squeeze money out of her. He is a horrible guy, but you don’t make films with despicable people – that doesn’t work. People want to relate, they want to identify. I’m stating the obvious. So how will I make Ripley likable? By humiliating him. At the beginning of the film, Ripley is nothing. Freddy doesn’t even look at him; he calls him ‘chum,’ which is openly disdainful. O’Brien acts high and mighty around him. Riccordi can’t remember his name. He is treated feudally, which puts everyone on his side. Many viewers even think it’s too bad he gets caught at the end. After everything he did!

So there is this entire social contrast between money and poverty, the outcast and the rich. From the start, Ripley’s approach is determined by the offer Greenleaf’s father makes to him. And Philippe has no desire to go home; all he wants to do is happily squander his fortune! Humiliation is always lurking in the background symbolically. It is what gives Ripley heft.

Couldn’t you have spared him the punishment? Highsmith lets him get away . . .

No, no, there’s no way around it; you cannot transgress. But let me tell you the ending I dreamed of: Ripley has taken revenge; he too is, for he has been able to want something through to its conclusion. Here he is on the restaurant terrace, with that boat in the background raising its black sail. Everything has come to a stop, even the wind. But no, the boat sails on. What will happen? Ripley is rich; he continues traveling. He goes to Athens – why not? He disembarks at the harbor, and all at once we see two policemen apparently waiting for him at the end of the footbridge. We assume he’s done for. But no: the rule there is for two policemen to be posted at every boat’s arrival. Ripley makes it through without any trouble. Everything is fine. He winds up at the Parthenon, sitting on the steps . . . asking himself if he should turn himself in to be someone, to find a place back in the society that had stuck him in a hole. Everything he did becomes meaningful in the face of a well-structured, specific society, but not in the void.

That was the ending I dreamed of shooting, but who would have understood it and how would I have expressed it? It was very difficult. Hakim talked me out of it, and he was certainly right. So I came back to the epilogue I had thought of from the beginning and which we used in the film. Somehow it reassures people. It is immanent justice.


Ripley does not premeditate. He gambles everything on Marge’s love.

I think that Ripley’s use of revenge was a noble art, which filled him with the kind of creative joy experienced by certain artists. He played with fire. The letter to Marge was a close call; it nearly gave him away. The signature was very well imitated, but Greenleaf never signed that way when he wrote to Marge. A serious mistake! We know how many schemes have collapsed due to insignificant details.

And he stays in Italy, where all of Greenleaf’s friends live.

He has no choice; he is penniless. He constantly gets stuck in impossible situations. In real life, you might risk one, two, maybe three brazen acts, but never four; you’d be too scared. But Ripley keeps going, and that is what makes him remarkable. He is also very intelligent. ‘You know, I look like this. But my imagination . . .’

Revenge is only a part of Ripley’s plan.

That’s very clear, especially in the mirror scene; he is already seeking to usurp Greenleaf’s identity.

How do we interpret the Marge-Greenleaf-Ripley triangle? Is seducing Marge a means for Ripley to complete his identification with Greenleaf or is it simply a way to get the money?

It’s a complex matter. Disguising himself, imitating Greenleaf’s voice, the letter – which in and of itself is taking possession of Greenleaf – the villa to which Ripley returns to possess Marge . . . It seems like mimicry, but it is mostly anthropophagy. Which reminds us of one of the most obscure and distant aspects of our nature. To consume the bread and the wine – ‘This is my body, this is my blood’ – isn’t that also anthropophagy? What about the mother who tells her child, ‘Oh, I could eat you up!’ And what is physical love, in a way, other than anthropophagy? We are neck-deep in this context, whether we like it or not.

And here we have a total absorption of Greenleaf by Ripley. What else would Ripley be doing when he orders Marge, ‘Play, play for me’? [. . .]


Was it a problem for you to have American characters played by Delon and Ronet opposite actors Frank Latimore and Bill Kearns?

That wasn’t important to me. Take a Japanese man, a Brit, and an American: as soon as you get past folklore, you’ll find the same man. When you read Dostoyevsky, you’re dealing with profoundly Slavic reactions. Why would that interest you if you weren’t experiencing them too? Let’s expose the action, strip it bare, like Gaston Baty did when he placed his actors in front of a curtain. Giving Delon or Ronet an American accent would have been a useless addition.

And we all know perfectly bilingual people who have made a life in France or Europe and don’t want to leave, because they don’t like America. Greenleaf feels good where he is. He wants to go to Taormina, not to Los Angeles.

Wasn’t Alain Delon initially considered to play Greenleaf?

We have to reestablish the correct chronology. Delon was never considered to play Greenleaf, but we did consider another actor, whose name I won’t mention. I didn’t agree with the Hakim brothers about this, though this other actor would have provided better marquee value at the time. Delon wasn’t a star yet and had not done anything to tempt a producer. When this vacuum for the part of Greenleaf occurred, Delon’s agent, Georges Beaume, contacted me [it’s unclear why Clément names Beaume, as Olga Horstig was Delon’s agent at the time; Beaume would not fill that role until later]. I went to see Michel Boisrond’s Faibles femmes. Delon did not really shine in it; he did not stand out. Nonetheless, there was something that interested me in certain ways. Georges Beaume came to see me with Alain. We talked, and Georges came up with the idea of switching Ronet’s and Delon’s parts, adjusting them based on the two actors. It became obvious to us that Ronet would be better in the part of Greenleaf, and Delon in that of Ripley.

And Alain became Ripley more and more, following everything that was said to him to the letter. He had an exceptional ability to concentrate, a surprisingly fine ear. A receptive actor of this quality is rare and very pleasant for a director. How many actors only understand what they already know? It was thanks to this acuity that I was able to play the game I was telling you about. Faced with the truth I was seeking, I always had Delon, ready to take on every impossibility of the action, for it is impossibility that makes the drama move forward, of course.


‘Purple Noon’ was also the first film you made with Henri Decaë, who later worked with you on ‘Le jour et l’heure’, ‘Che gioia vivere’, and ‘Les félins’.

I wanted a certain style of photography and for Decaë to capture the light of the Gulf of Naples. The Naples sky is like no other. I observed it when I was traveling around the bay, spending entire days on a boat. When the sun rises in the morning, around five thirty or six, a marvel on the order of grace occurs. The air is light, a little sulfury; and the sulfur slowly becomes white, pastel, blue; and the gentle rocking makes one think of Bellini’s music. That’s where we come back to Ripley: why wouldn’t he also let himself be rocked to Taormina? With Marge, who inherited all that money? Notice that these sequences are punctuated by the Naples-Ischia crossing, with the small boat that crosses the bay and goes back down to Mongibello, toward that water-surrounded territory that is a little like Cythera.

Film shoots at sea are among the most challenging.

If you film the sea from two different angles, it won’t be the same color. Everything depends on the reflection of the sky. If the incidences aren’t the same, the color will change from one shot to the next, and it will be impossible to match them. You can’t put two shots on open water next to each other. The first one will be blue, the next green. It’s terrifying. You have to shoot cutaways to get from one color to the other by playing against the sky’s coloring.

When you’re at sea, you’re constantly confronted with the unexpected. Everyone knows the legend that the Flying Dutchman appears when a death has occurred on a boat. In Purple Noon, a white ship appears in the background right after Greenleaf’s murder. Isn’t it amazing that our Flying Dutchman arrived right as we were shooting this scene? It wasn’t called for, obviously; how could I put that in a script? Do you think a lot of ships with square lights go by in the Mediterranean?

We were quietly eating our spaghetti when it came along. It was an extraordinary sailboat belonging to the king of Denmark. We rushed to our boat. I asked Alain to jump at the same time, so I could get a first shot of him. We were being offered the Flying Dutchman!

Similarly, when I was preparing to shoot Greenleaf’s murder, the sea got whipped up and the wind suddenly got colder. In one morning, we filmed what would normally have taken a week’s work. Camera in hand, Decaë did everything I asked with tremendous courage. I know sailing – it’s my favorite sport – otherwise I wouldn’t have taken the risk. There were twenty people locked inside the Marge. We came down from the sailboat as quickly as we could to board a big launch, leaving Alain to get by alone, following the instructions I gave him by walkie-talkie. Alain was seasick; he couldn’t feel the deck move beneath him without feeling ill. It took great courage on his part to do it. Decaë was astride the launch’s stem as it leapt six feet over the waves, trying to frame this boat coming straight at us, and we were all wondering if Alain would be able to prevent the boat’s inertia from making it go adrift.

I knew a few tricks, like pointing the ship toward the wind, which gives a real cannon blast, but ran the risk of tearing the cotton sails, which were quite worn. I was in my own reality, and Alain, carried away by everything that was happening, gave us the scene you’ve watched.

In this case, we found ourselves in direct continuity with what I instinctively try to produce – which is to create when the opportunity arises to do so.


Had you planned for the storm?

It could have not happened, but we always had to be ready, just in case . . . Now if it hadn’t happened, I don’t know if we could have waited for it to happen . . .

How did you shoot the interiors of the boat?

The producers found us an abandoned movie theater close to the port. Paul Bertrand thought of building the boat set in there. I had a crane installed on risers three feet off the ground, with a track all along the set. The boat was on springs. A small part of the deck was removable, and I could use my crane to make the camera go down wherever I wanted – do a tracking shot, a pan, jump from one side to the other. The end of the crane was narrow enough to allow all these maneuvers. It was my ‘secret’: the narrower the place, the more I used my crane. I had already tried all this out on Gervaise, where much of the banquet was filmed like this. The crane is a way of moving the camera, and not simply a device to make it go up and down, as some believe. It is as if you took a weightless camera between your thumb and index finger, as if you put it on the tip of a weasel’s nose to look in every nook and cranny.

The rest of the film was shot on location. Apart from the Marge interiors, we only spent one day on a soundstage: for the scene in Ripley’s apartment, which was shot in Joinville.

How did you work with Rota?

He was a marvelous, multitalented character, with an admirable understanding of images. When he asked me what kind of music I wanted for Purple Noon, I still didn’t ‘hear’ any, but I had quite a specific intuition. ‘What do we see in this film?’ I asked him. ‘The Bay of Naples. And for me, Naples is Bellini. I can easily see Norma. That’s Ripley. It’s ‘Casta Diva.’’ We started thinking about it, and we got a melody line from Bellini. What was I looking for? I wanted to understand what Greenleaf, Marge, and maybe Ripley liked about the Bay of Naples. I saw a ship dancing on the waves, going toward that island – and anytime you go toward an island, all sorts of legends come alive – leaving again . . . You have to admit, it is quite pleasant to let yourself be rocked by that beautiful light, with those bluish mountains dominating the dark blue horizon, that calm, that mildness, those jasmine and orange-tree scents crossing the entire bay . . .


The credits start with this theme, but we don’t reach the end of it. And we nibble at it bit by bit, measure by measure, painstakingly moving forward . . . And Ripley has to work hard to make a living.

To start a theme and leave it hanging is to create a tension; the viewer is waiting for the chord. If you listen to the soundtrack, you’ll see how the first measures are hard and rapped out. It’s difficult to get to the first twist, which provides an answer after Ripley has had his first successes. But we’re not sure yet that we’ll get to the end, and completion is only attained over the very last shots. ‘Phew! He saved the best for last.’

Speaking of the soundtrack, it should be added that the film was entirely dubbed and that nothing remains of the original sound. The Italian sound engineer, who was used to the local method of post-synchronizing every film, had made a recording just good enough for the edit. There was interference, background noise, people talking. Everything had to be redone here. So I hired a boom operator. In order to re-create the real audio perspectives, I had him run after the actors as they went off in every direction. I remember Delon and Ronet chasing each other around the auditorium, jumping over a piano to get the right breathing, the inflections I was asking for. So Purple Noon is not truly a dubbed film; you can’t tell.

For the sound of the sea, we tried and failed to get sound from Hollywood. I decided to make it myself. I imitated the sound of the sea, the wind, and the waves at the microphone. I would record them on a tape recorder at home, then mix them in the studio. Purple Noon is the kind of film you make passionately, where every detail counts. We all believed in it.

I always tried to move forward, to evolve, rather than to repeat myself. People like to classify you. After Forbidden Games, it would have been great to say, ‘Clément equals childhood specialist.’ But what does that mean? I have always been humble in the way I situate myself vis-à-vis the fantastic means of expression in cinema, of which so much remains to be explored. I always wanted to make studies of various situations and places. It’s a workshop spirit: ‘We’ve studied that; now we’re going to study this.’ Each time, I try to take advantage of what I’ve learned, to make one plus two lead to three, and for the latest film to be the sum of all those that came before. I tried to move forward one step at a time; I go up the stairs step by step toward . . . I don’t know what floor. My life and destiny will decide that . . . People have had the impression I was searching for my way; in fact, I was always trying to go further. But perfectionism is a kind of vise that can close in on you. You have to avoid falling prey to it, and to always have more tools to tell stories.

– ‘The Kind of Film You Make Passionately’: René Clément on Purple Noon. Interview by Olivier Eyquem and Jean-Claude Missiaen. In L’avant-scène: Cinéma. February 1, 1981. Translated by Nicholas Elliott. Courtesy of www.criterion.com

Monday 20 April 2020

Patricia Highsmith II: The Talented Mr. Ripley

Plein Soleil/Purple Noon (Directed by Rene Clement)

This is the second part of Patricia Highsmith’s 1988 interview from Sight And Sound. She discusses other cinematic adaptations of her books including the Ripley series - the best of which is René Clément’s stylish 1960 adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley - Plein Soleil (Purple Noon) - starring Alain Delon as the pathological Ripley who ingratiates himself into the lives of the rich and idle. 

Several of Highsmith’s favorite versions of her works have been for television: a West German adaptation of Deep Water, and a Quebec retelling of several short stories. She thinks Le Meurtier (Enough Rope, 1963), from her 1954 novel, The Blunderer, is ‘a jolly good film,’ and she is negotiating now to sell rights for a remake. She must choose between competing bidders: an Italian producer and French filmmaker, Claude Chabrol.

‘Lately I ask for 4, 5 ,6-page treatments from [potential] buyers of my books. I turn down plenty of them because they aren’t inspired.’ Le Meurtier, directed by Claude Autant-Lara, moved Highsmith’s New York setting to Southern France. ‘I hope this time it will be set in California,’ she says. And why? A character in The Blunderer is a sadistic New Jersey policeman who commutes into New York and beats up murder suspects as part of his investigations. ‘In a way, I made a mistake,’ Highsmith admits, ‘because a New Jersey policeman can’t operate that way in New York. But in California, he can move between different counties.’

In 1952, under the nom de plume Claire Morgan, Highsmith published The Price of Salt, a novel of lesbian love, notably radical in its day for having a happy ending. The heroine, Therese, rejects her boyfriend (who is given to quoting from A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man) for a passionate new life in the arms of sophisticated Carol. This was Highsmith’s only overtly gay novel prior to her new Found in the Street, which is set in the casually bisexual New York art world. Critics, however, have noted homosexual underpinning in Highsmith’s many tales of unusual male friendships, especially the four Ripley novels. Tom Ripley is constantly mistaken for being ‘queer.’ He likes to attend all-guy parties and to masquerade in other men’s clothes, particularily the garments of males who obsess him. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, he develops an undeniable crush on Dickie Greenleaf. When Greenleaf spurns him, Ripley kills the young man, By the fourth novel, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, her hero, Tom, has committed eight murders (by Highsmith’s count) and got away with all of them.

‘I don’t think Ripley is gay,’ Highsmith says adamantly in Toronto. ’He appreciates good looks in other men, that’s true. But he’s married in later books. I’m not saying he’s very strong in the sex department. But he makes it in bed with his wife.’ In The American Friend, an idiosyncratic reading of Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, Wim Wenders made Ripley (Dennis Hopper) into a bachelor once again. ’Ripley has some nice friends though,’ Wenders told an interviewer. ’He’s not a solitary and he’s not a homosexual. Not explicitly. But the way he handles Jonathan has a lot to do with homosexuality.’ When these comments were quoted to her, Highsmith counters, ’Ripley is married. And he’s not lost. He has his feet on the ground.’ As for Wenders, Highsmith says, ’He mingled two books for The American Friend. One of them he didn’t buy.’ (Wenders’ frame story concerns forged paintings, a plot fragment borrowed, uncredited, from Ripley Under Ground).

The American Friend (Directed by Wim Wenders)
Highsmith met Wenders before The American Friend, when he tried to buy film rights to one of her books. According to Wenders, the novels he was interested in, Cry of the Owl and The Tremor of Forgery, were already optioned. Highsmith suggested he read the one she had just finished writing. ‘It was Ripley’s Game,’ said Wenders, ’and I liked it from the beginning.’ And Highsmith liked Wenders. ‘There’s something about him that’s OK. His artistic quality, his enthusiasm.’ The American Friend she concedes, has a certain ‘stylishness,’ and she thinks the scenes on the train are terrific. Also, she liked Wenders’s Paris, Texas. But, back in The American Friend, she is confused by Dennis Hopper’s highway cowboy rendition of Ripley. ‘Those aren’t my words,’ she says of his philosophical soliloquies.

Highsmith thinks that handsome Alain Delon was excellent as Ripley in Plein Soleil/Purple Noon (1959), Rene Clement’s adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, though she was jolted by the ending - not hers - in which Ripley is caught after throwing the murdered Dickie Greenleaf overboard. But perhaps she says, Strangers on a Train’s Robert Walker might have been the best Ripley of all, if he had lived. Alas, Highsmith has become bored in Toronto talking about the movie versions of her novels. Finally, she says, film directors can do what they want with her books, once she has signed the contract. Especially since she isn’t interested in doing the scripts herself. ’I started screenplays two or three times, and I can assure you that I failed. I don’t think in the way a playwright thinks. So if people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies.

Anyway, I don’t want to know movie directors. I don’t want to be close to them. I don’t want to interfere with their work. I don’t want them to interfere with mine.’ She rarely sees movies. When she does, it is usually to catch up, such as on a jaunt to the Locarno Film Festival near her home. A decade ago, Highsmith was president of the jury at the Berlin Film Festival. ’I was not particularily good at it,’ she remembers. ‘I hated cracking the whip, and these juries turn into political things. Some fellow from the Third World kept hammering for prizes for a Communist film which was rotten.’ An obvious final question. Does Highsmith have a favorite movie of all time? ’No.’ Not Citizen Kane or Casablanca? ‘No, no,’ she says again, but then she smiles to herself. ‘Maybe Gone With the Wind - and it’s a great book as well.’ -

Patricia Highsmith interviewed by Gerald Peary.

Monday 13 April 2020

Patricia Highsmith I: Strangers On A Train

Strangers On A Train (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist and short-story writer, most notable for her psychologically gripping thrillers, in which she probed into the nature of guilt, innocence, good and evil.

Graduating from Barnard College, in New York City  in 1942, she journeyed to Europe finally settling in Switzerland. 

She wrote Strangers on a Train in 1950, which Alfred Hitchcock memorably filmed starring Farley Granger and Robert Walker. Two train passengers, Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno are on the same train. Haines is a wealthy architect who is going through a divorce, while Bruno is a mysterious and manipulative speaker, offering Bruno's father's life in exchange for Haines's wife. 

The climax of the novel takes place when Bruno launches his complicated plot and Guy finds himself stuck in Highsmith's sinister universe, where ordinary people are capable of doing great atrocities. 

The film launched her prodigious career, and established her as a master of the characteristically disquieting undercurrents beneath the surface of everyday life.

Her most well-known creation is Tom Ripley, a likeable killer who assumes the identities of his victims. He featured initially in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) winning several awards for mystery writing. Ripley also appeared in Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley’s Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), and Ripley Under Water (1991). 

Among her other books are The Price of Salt (1952; written under the pseudonym Claire Morgan), the story of a love affair between a married woman and a younger, unmarried woman (which was filmed in 2015 as Carol, the name under which the novel was published in 1990), and The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder (1975), about the killing of humans by animals. Highsmith’s collections of short stories include The Black House (1981) and Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (1987).

Patricia Highsmith gave a rare interview with Gerald Peary for Sight And Sound Magazine in 1988 where she discussed her writing process, Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train, and other adaptations of her work:

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Highsmith grew up in New York City. She took a degree at Barnard College. Then came years of traveling about Europe. Today she lives in Switzerland alone.‘I can’t write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman. I like to work for four or five hours a day. I aim for seven days a week. I have no television – I hate it. I listen to the BBC World Service starting at 2 in the morning until 4. I switch off the light and listen in bed. I don’t set the alarm to get up. I get up when I feel like it.’

She owns no copies of films made from her books, not even Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 version of her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950). ‘It seems to be entertaining after all these years,’ she acknowledges. ‘They keep playing it on American TV, ancient as it is. A few years ago, there were requests to me, “Can we make this?” I said that I have no rights. Contact the Hitchcock estate, which won’t release it for a remake.’

Strangers on a Train was sold outright for $7,500, with ten per cent of that to Highsmith’s agent. A meager recompense, some would say, but Highsmith disagrees. ‘That wasn't a bad price for a first book, and my agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment. I didn’t hang around films. I don’t know if I’d ever seen Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes." Anyway, she heard later that Robert Bloch was paid only $9,000 by Hitchcock for his novel Psycho.

About Strangers on a Train: she adores Robert Walker as the psychopathic Bruno. (‘He was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother.’) Highsmith is less pleased with Ruth Roman as Ann Morton, Guy’s love interest. (‘She should be much warmer.’) And she regrets Hithcock’s decision to turn Guy (Farley Granger), an architect in her novel, into a championship-winning tennis player. Highsmith: ‘I thought it was ludicrous that he’s aspiring to be a politician, and that he’s supposed to be in love with that stone angel.’ She only talked to Hitchcock once, while Strangers on a Train was in pre-production. ‘I was in New York. He was in California. He rang me to make a report on his progress and said, “I'm having trouble. I've just sacked my second screenwriter.’”

Hitchcock eventually hired Raymond Chandler to write the final script. Highsmith never met Chandler or seemingly any other writer of suspense novels. She doesn’t read them, she says, except, over and over again, the master: Dostoevsky. Also Graham Greene, a declared Highsmith admirer, with whom she exchanges occasional letters. ‘I have his telephone number but I wouldn’t dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.’

Highsmith has never seen Once You Kiss a Stranger, a 1969 Warners variation on Strangers on a Train, in which a crazy girl (Carol Lynley) offers to assassinate the chief competition of a golf pro (Paul Burke) if this golfer will bump off her psychiatrist.‘God knows, it was certainly done behind my back!’ Highsmith laughs. ‘Strangers on a Golf Course.’

The writer says she is ‘not mad about’ Claude Miller's 1997 Dites-lui que je l'aime from her novel, This Sweet Sickness, and she loathes Ediths Tagebuch, the 1983 West German film by Hans Geissendorfer, drawn from her Edith’s Diary, a rare Highsmith novel with a female protagonist. In the book, Edith Howland, a suburban Pennsylvania housewife, suffers mightily because her homebound son, Cliffie, is so passive, unambitious, mediocre. In the movie, which is set in Germany, Cliffie becomes a psychotic who lusts after Edith, his mom (Angela Winkler).  ‘It's dreadful!’ Highsmith says. ‘Making the son in love with the mother is a lot of Oedipal crap.’ She was taken aback because Geissendorfer’s version of The Glass Cell/Die Glaserne Zelle (1977) was a decent, sensitive film, a notable portrayal of the anguish of a man (Helmut Griem) out of prison for a white-collar crime, who suspects that his wife (Brigitte Fossey) is enmeshed in a love affair...

- Patricia Highsmith interviewed by Gerald Peary.