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Who do you think was the best Ripley?

posted 18 years ago by benjaminorchard
20 replies | jump to latest

Patricia Highsmith's character of Tom Ripley has now been played by five VERY, VERY different actors:

By Alain Delon in "Purple Noon", by Dennis Hopper in "The American Friend", by Matt Damon in "The Talented Mr. Ripley", by John Malkovich in "Ripley's Game" and now by Barry Pepper in "Ripley Under Ground".

I've just finished reading my way through Highsmith's "Ripliad", but I've only had the opportunity to see two of the films, "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Ripley's Game"...

From watching those, I think that Malkovich was much more like the character as Highsmith wrote him in the books than Damon was.

"The Talented Mr. Ripley" script changed the character too much. In that film Ripley was this nervous, angsty, homosexual who commits a few impulsive crimes of passion and is forever wracked with guilt over his actions.

Malkovich was much more evil in "Ripley's Game"... a suave, cultured, confident heterosexual sociopath who thinks his crimes through meticulously and sees the people around him as mere pawns to be manipulated for his own sick amusement.

It's funny, but I find the character of Ripley more interesting and charismatic, the more evil he is. When Anthony Minghella tried to make him more sympathetic in "The Talented Mr. Ripley" - I liked him a lot LESS.

[–] waldenpond88 12 years ago

No doubt about it: Alain Delon was the best Ripley ever and when I reread the books by Patricia Highsmith, it's his face that I see in my imagination when thinking of Ripley.
Matt Damon looked too young for being Ripley and Dennis Hopper (The American Friend) and John Malkovich (Ripley's Game) both were already too old for the part IMHO.

But Alain Delon was at the prefect age to play Ripley.
Too bad he couldn't play Ripley again when in 1970 "Ripley Under Ground" (the second novel) was published and unfortunately not filmed before 2005/2006. In 1970 Alain Delon would have been young enough to play Ripley once more.