Word: murdered
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...beam on and off at will, indulging Marge's love while he stealthily impregnates an Italian woman. In a movie that ups the sexual octane of the book, Tom's interest in Dickie is explicitly homoerotic, the yearning poignant and desperate. The killing in the boat is less murder than the fatal flailing of a rejected suitor. Tom is crushed by Dickie's dismissal, so he crushes Dickie...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Maybe Rubin Carter was a hurricane in the ring, but the movie version of his story--the middleweight contender who was framed on murder charges based on racism--downgrades him to a tropical storm. In Washington's finely shaded performance he's a low-pressure system, illuminated by distant flashes of lightning...