Cinema: The Talented Ms. Highsmith

If your father walked out before you were born and your mother says she tried to abort you by guzzling turpentine, you may grow up with a sour view of humanity. Mary Patricia Plangman Highsmith--born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921--had murder on her mind from the first of her 23 novels, the 1950 Strangers on a Train. Alfred Hitchcock made a film of it a year later, though he dared include only one of the book's two murders. Soon after, the woman whom screenwriter Michael Tolkin (The Player) calls "our best expatriate since Henry James" left for Europe, where she was welcomed as an important novelist, not just a thriller writer. From this pleasant remove, she wrote of another ruthlessly imaginative expat, Tom Ripley.

The five novels--The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley's Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980) and Ripley Under Water (1991)--trace a rake's progress from callow kid to elegant arriviste. "Wonderful to sit in a famous cafe," he thinks after his first murder, "and to think of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow being Dickie Greenleaf!" For all his tomorrows, Tom gets to steep himself in la Dickie vita. He lives in a fine house near Paris with a handsome blond wife who is blessedly indifferent to his shadier activities. From Dickie's estate and from the profits of an art-forgery racket, Tom has an income that gives him the leisure to paint, garden and commit the odd homicide. His whole life is a consummate forgery. He's become a counterfeit Dickie, better than the original.

The last two Ripley novels are slack, ungainly; Ripley is more prey than predator. But the first three (recently issued in a hardcover omnibus by Knopf/Everyman's Library) have the tone of high, dark comedy. Tom kills--Dickie, Dickie's pal Freddie Miles, an American art lover, a bunch of mafiosi--as much for the game of eluding capture as for motives of profit or survival. In Ripley's Game he gets an ailing man involved in a murder plot only because the man once spoke abruptly to Tom. Then, when the man desperately tries to kill a Mafia goon, who shows up to help but Ripley? Good deeds or bad, they're just caprices for a gentleman rogue.

"I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial," Highsmith wrote, "for neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not." But she cared for Ripley, her alter ego or attractive opposite. She attributed the first book's popularity to "the insolence and audacity of Ripley himself... I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing." In gratitude, she kept him forever young. The novels span 36 years, and each is set in the present; yet Tom ages only about a decade. He is the Dorian Gray of crime.

His creator's life was less charmed. A recluse with a prison matron's visage, she had several lovers, of both sexes, but was alone at the end with her cats and pet snails. Did this adopted doyenne of Europe resent being neglected back home? At her death, in 1995, she had no U.S. publisher for her last work. And though nearly a score of films were made from her novels and short stories, most of them were European. The Talented Mr. Ripley is the first Hollywood-studio production of a Highsmith novel since Strangers on a Train.

--R.C.