Word: offing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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We look at Alain Delon (the delicate stud of Purple Noon) or Dennis Hopper (who gave Ripley a cowboy swagger in the 1977 The American Friend, Wim Wenders' adaptation of Ripley's Game) and see an actor sharpening his tools: the attentiveness, the useful smile, the waiting for a cue...
Damon, who like Blanchett and Paltrow was cast in the film before achieving Oscar-night eminence, knows how to emit charm--of the aw-shucks variety in The Rainmaker or streetwise in Good Will Hunting. Here, though, he is a plodder. Pasty white among the bronze gods of Mongibello, striding...
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...
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...
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...