Purple Noon (Plein Soleil)

Rene Clement's Purple Noon (Plein Soleil) is a highly successful marriage of at least two movies. By turn a mystery thriller and a beautiful portrait of the Mediterranean, it emerges as a poignant statement of human corruption in a modern Eden.

Movie number one is the thriller. A young, destitute American has been commissioned by a wealthy Californian to lure his expatriate son Phillip away from Italy and Marge, a beautiful but suspect art student. Hating his sadistic charge and envious of his wealth, Tom murders him, disposes of his body and in a dangerous game of impersonation, seeks to substitute himself for his victim.

Movie number two is Clement's portrait of Eden. His cameras follow Phillipe's sloop Marge along the lush Italian coast from Rome to Sicily. From the Mediterranean setting he creates not so much a background as a circumscribed universe which encloses the action in a glass bell of almost suffocating beauty.

Purple Noon studies its characters carefully and objectively, and Clement has made full use of his small but uniformly excellent cast. As the cruel and brutish playboy, Maurice Ronet stands out from the mass of playboys murdered in thrillers. When Marge puts off making love to lecture him on art, he explodes, destroys her notes, and roars "Why do you mix Fra Angelico and love?"

Marie Laforet alternates between passion and great delicacy in the part of the sensuous, yet sensitive and enigmatic Marge. Unable to resist her painful attraction for Phillipe, she is successively tortured, loving, jealous, injured, and despite her mercurial temperament, always in character.

Of the three, though, Alain Delon, who established his reputation as Rocco in Rocco and His Brothers, is the most impressive as the debonair but homicidal protagonist lusting for "le meilleur." The entire design to murder Philippe develops unspoken in his eyes, where greed and hatred of a tormentor become obviously irresistible.

But this is Clement's movie, and it is his achievement that his two movies maintain a fragile but definite unity. In some of the most exciting moments of the film Clement weaves a rich musical score around his protagonist as a constant reminder of Eden.

Man, observes Clement, is given the fruits of the earth, yet his own nature leads him to renounce them and turns him to violence and despair. The point is made gently and with resignation in this movie of rare ugliness and rare beauty.