Messy Mnages

Purple Noon (Times Film Corp.). Tom will do anything for money, except work. Lucky boy. he has his looks, and because of them he has Philip, a rich young degenerate he met at school in San Francisco. Sometimes together, sometimes as a messy menage a trois with Philip's mistress, they live the sweet life in the pleasure pots of southern Italy. But all is not pleasure in the parasite's paradise. Philip (Maurice Ronet) uses Tom (Alain Delon) to run small errands, keeps a firm grip on the purse strings, taunts him with his poverty, and one day, just for kicks, sets him adrift in a dinghy on the open sea. Rescued on the verge of sunstroke, Tom puts his vicious little mind to work on a vicious little scheme to get rid of Philip but still hang on to his meal ticket.

Tom's scheme, first elaborated in a novel (The Talented Mr. Ripley] by Patricia Highsmith, is now dramatized by Director Rene (Forbidden Games) Clement in a film noir that is skillful as well as repulsive. One pleasant summer's day, while drifting lazily over the Bay of Naples, Tom suddenly rams a fish knife into Philip's heart, wraps his body in a tarpaulin, weights it with an anchor, drops it overboard. Then he sails back to port, puts his own picture in Philip's passport, schools himself to forge the victim's signature, coolly cashes his checks and starts to live it up.

But to cover his first murder, Tom must commit a second, which he blames on Philip, who as far as anybody knows is still alive. To get rid of Philip, Tom then writes a suicide note, signs Philip's name to it and in the note leaves Philip's entire estate to the mistress. Tom then seduces the mistress, who insists that he live with her--in Philip's apartment, on Philip's money. The Eastmancolor photography by Henri Decae, a superb young craftsman who rode the New Wave (The Four Hundred Blows, The Cousins) to success, bathes all this in an innocent holiday light that makes the crime seem the more hideous by contrast, like a big hairy spider crawling slowly across a travel poster.

The Joker (Ajym; Lopert). A skylight opens. A young man's head pops out. "Hurry, darling, hurry!'' a woman gasps. "My husband is coming!" Jauntily the young man leaps to the roof, shoots his cuffs, leaps to the next roof, thumbs his nose at the raging cuckold, dances off into the dawn. The young man is Jean-Pierre Cassel, whose frantic antics in The Love Game (TIME. Nov. 28) made him overnight the Danny Kaye of the French New Wave, and instead of popping out of that skylight he should of stood in bed. The Love Game was a delightfully risky, frisky, upstairs -downstairs -and -in -my-lady's-chamber sort of farce. The Joker is just a second verse, a little bit louder and a whole lot worse.

Who's to blame? Partly Cassel, mostly Director Philippe de Broca. As before, De Broca has cast Cassel as a sort of Don Juan in diapers. He plays the younger son in a cheery Charles Addams family that inhabits a large, sunny, 19th century cobweb littered with charming bits of bric-a-brac and squalling testimonials to the efficacy of the hero's family motto: "Fructify!" The family lives in a dream world all its own, posing for imaginary deathbed scenes of famous men. playing baroque quintets in the evening, avidly at all times hankering after news of the hero's latest fructifications. For the first half-hour the dream world has its humors, but it soon gets to be as dull as any other adolescent fantasy. Still, the script offers some wickedly keen lines. "Now let's talk about you," says a busy industrialist, figuring to give the little woman's morale a lift. "Were the shrubs delivered?"

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