#2 You probably don't spend as much time as I do thinking about how amazing Robert Ryan is, but you might, if you watched this movie. One of Ryan's specialities is a barely suppressed rage that's constantly in danger of erupting into violence.
This is going to sound like I’m ruining the plot for you, but what I’m about to describe is really only the beginning of what is a very long, very bad day for the corrupt Detective Ko, so trust me and read on.
This was Delon’s first big movie, and even if he weren’t very good, you can see why. But Delon is shockingly good. His Tom Ripley is a criminal novice. Much of the pleasure of both Highsmith’s first Ripley novel and of "Purple Noon" is watching Tom come into his own as a sociopath.
To move away from his usual roles as a romantic lead, Power bought the rights to the novel in order to play its antihero, Stan Carlisle. The story begins and ends at a carnival sideshow, with characters musing about the show’s geek, a man brought so low that he bites the heads off chickens.
The opening of the film says it all: A two-shot of Tierney’s anxious, sweaty, and snarling Vincent Lubeck and his brother, Johnny, framed in—and divided by—the windshield of a car, as Johnny (Tierney’s real-life brother, Edward) drives his brother back to the city dump by which they grew up.
