This Day in Literary History (Death of Psychological Thriller Author Patricia Highsmith)

 

Feb. 4, 1995— Patricia Highsmith, whose psychological thrillers achieved greater sales, critical acclaim, and understanding in Europe than in her native United States, died at age 74 of leukemia in Locarno, Switzerland.

Since her death 30 years ago, however, a virtual cottage industry about her work has sprung up in the U.S., with at least three biographies, and numerous reprints of her books, appearing.

Whatever fame Highsmith gained at home derived from two novels adapted into classic films by Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train, 1951) and Anthony Minghella (The Talented Mr. Ripley, 1999). Her pigeonholing as a “crime writer” annoyed her because it said nothing about her profound probing of the human heart.

Beneath the placid surface of American life, discontents, even demons, lurked in her fiction. Many of her intimates agree that Highsmith shared many of these—indeed, if she didn’t have writing as an outlet where she could vent these, she feared that she might go insane.

Outsiders, misfits, manipulators, sociopaths—an entire psychological spectrum can be described in Highsmith’s work. On a podcast I listened to today, one of her later friends said she didn’t doubt that Highsmith herself existed on the autistic spectrum.

More specifically, some see the writer as being a high-functioning case of Asperger’s Syndrome. She possessed many unusual traits, including a terrible sense of direction, hypersensitivity to sound and touching, clumsiness, and depression.

Even before she struggled with alcoholism for much of her adult life, Highsmith had to cope with the revelation that her mother tried unsuccessfully to abort her when she was only four years old.

Even though her collected fiction is considerable—22 novels and eight short-story collections—it’s remarkable how certain themes and motifs reappear obsessively:

*fractured or swapped entities;

*murder;

*madness;

*pairs who bring out depths of evil in each other;

*malignant mothers; and

*guilt.

Just as her characters traffic in aliases, Highsmith resorted to pseudonyms. The most famous, “Claire Morgan,” was adopted for the initial publication of her 1952 celebration of lesbian love, The Price of Salt.  

She used others in letters to the editor that were printed in the Herald-Tribune, where she fulminated against Catholics, neighbors, Frenchmen in general and their bureaucrats in particular—and, most problematically, Jews.

Her characters are frequently doubles and alter egos. More chillingly, her narratives feature complicit characters and readers.

Flashback, December 1999: ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ Neo-Hitchcockian Thriller, Opens

When  the psychological thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley opened in American theaters in December 1999, it seemed, on the surface, like old-fashioned entertainment out of the Fifties, with glamorous rising stars, lush on-location filming in the Mediterranean, and suspense that didn’t veer into geysers of blood.

Old-fashioned, but only up to a point. Certain aspects of the plot and characters wouldn’t have passed muster with the censors back then. Even Alfred Hitchcock, who directed an acclaimed adaptation of a prior novel by Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train, had to bow, at least to an extent, to restrictions set by the Production Code Administration.

The “Master of Suspense,” for instance, had to employ then-current Hollywood “code”—a male character’s obsession with personal appearance and a domineering mother—to suggest that one character was gay. And he could not allow a sympathetic character to resort to blackmail. But the passage of time and changes in social mores permitted a more complicated vision.

Did screenwriter-director Anthony Minghella in Ripley display the editing wizardry and offbeat humor so characteristic of Hitchcock? No. But he had the same obsession with apparel as a signifier of character, and a similar fascination with transgressiveness—in this case, a grifter-turned-serial killer.

Minghella wasn’t the first—and turned out not to be the last—to take a crack at Ripley: Rene Clement’s 1960 French version, Purple Noon, starred Alain Delon, while Netflix mounted an eight-part, black-and-white miniseries starring Andrew Scott that streamed earlier this year on Netflix.

What accounts for this material’s enduring appeal? It touches on motifs and themes that fascinate viewers: wealth, class, obsession, slippery identities, and “doubles”—characters who share traits with each other.

Binding it all together is an amoral villain so compelling that Highsmith ended up tracking his progress in five novels produced over three decades: The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, and Ripley Under Water.

In interviews, Highsmith refused to endorse the idea that her grifter-turned-murderer Tom Ripley was gay or bisexual.

But Ripley’s obsessive attachment to the privileged Dickie Greenleaf and his lack of feeling for any female character lend themselves to this interpretation, so Minghella wasn’t veering too far afield by rendering Tom’s sexuality more explicit.

The screenplay is at pains to increase viewers’ sympathy for and complicity in Tom’s crimes by giving him a motive besides simple avarice. 

At the same time, in contrast to the often heartless Highsmith, Minghella heightens the plight of women by making Gwyneth Paltrow’s Marge less contemptuous of Tom and by inventing an entire new character in Cate Blanchette’s Meredith Logue.

The movie, while dispensing with the novel’s pointed allusion to Henry James’ The Ambassadors (another tale about an American dispatched by a wealthy family to bring their son home), retains the international setting and conflicts so characteristic of the expatriate writer.

This time, however, there’s a twist: the American venturing abroad, Ripley, is not an innocent, but an aesthete whose tastes are facilitated by his talents for mooching, forgery, impersonation, improvisation, and murder.

I can’t tell you all the articles I came across on the Web about Ripley’s sartorial style. It’s almost as if the public (and certainly the fashion industry) is as besotted by the la dolce vita lifestyle of Dickie Greenleaf as Tom Ripley was.

Ripley was nominated for five Oscars, including best supporting actor (Law), adapted screenplay (Minghella), art direction, costume design, and original score. But it should have received more nods, and it has aged well, with some of the best performances ever turned in by Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow.

In the mid-Fifties, Highsmith anticipated a tendency that became overwhelming within a few decades: the American susceptibility to grifters adept at reinventing themselves.

 More than four decades later, Minghella masterfully captured the utter emptiness of all this frenzied, and criminal, striving: a villain who confesses, to the only person who begins to sound his depths, why he feels so alone even now: “I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.”

Movie Review: ‘Coup de Chance,’ by Woody Allen

There was a time when the release of virtually any Woody Allen movie would be enough to lure me into a theater. But I began to feel queasy after the messy fallout from his relationship with Mia Farrow, over three decades ago. I became even more reluctant in the last decade, as his films grew wispier and less original.

When the MeToo movement made it harder for Allen to line up stateside investors and outlets for his work, he looked abroad for countries that asked fewer questions about filmmakers’ private lives. He settled on France (home to Roman Polanski, whose legal and ethical difficulties with young women have been even worse than Allen's).

As a result, the Brooklyn native has gone far beyond merely filming in France with a largely English-speaking crew (as occurred with Midnight in Paris). Instead, he has directed an entirely Francophone set of film professionals—and without knowing any French.

So I paid scant attention last year, when Coup de Chance was pulled from the Cannes Film Festival for fear that allegations that Allen had molested stepdaughter Dylan Farrow in 1992 would distract attention from the artistic merits of the entire lineup. 

Though it eventually premiered at the Venice Film Festival last September, viewers did not have a chance to see it stateside until this spring, either streaming or in selected theaters. Start-to-finish subtitles didn't help in breaking out to a wider audience.

(I saw it at the Barrymore Film Center, a haven for revival, art-house, and independent cinema aficionados like me in Bergen County, NJ. You would be very lucky to see it anywhere else; it has come and gone in selected theaters in the blink of an eye.)

Predictably, Allen’s notoriety has colored how his new film would be perceived even before most people have had a chance to look at it. “Did he have any 13-year-old girls in it?” a close relative snickered. (The answer: no.)

Coup de Chance, translated into English as “Stroke of Luck,” counterparts the different attitudes toward fate held by the two men who vie for the love of Fanny (played by Lou de Laâge), a beautiful auction house worker: Her middle-aged husband Jean (played by Melvil Poupaud) believes there is no such thing as luck, and his own status—an affluent financial adviser who won the hand of Fanny—seems proof enough for him.

In contrast, the writer Alain (played by Niels Schneider) has encountered Fanny years after developing a crush on her while they were high school classmates in New York. His spontaneity and openness to experience appeal to the long-dormant bohemian instincts of Fanny, who has become bored with the carefully scheduled urban parties and country weekends of Jean.

Much of the film contains the kind of quiet foreboding (e.g., Jean’s love for hunting, and the mysterious fate of his onetime partner) that also characterized Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point. 

With few of the memorable lines that fill so much of Allen's other work, I grew concerned that he might be simply regurgitating motifs from these earlier entries in what might be called his “Desire, Murder and Guilt” trilogy.

Even within this film, Allen repeats images and references, as if he didn’t want the least attentive viewer to overlook any symbolism.

Once wishes that Allen might have worked with a collaborator on the screenplay, as he did with Marshall Brickman on Sleeper, Annie Hall, and Manhattan, to rescue him from such redundancy, as well as various implausible plot developments.

But, though the screenplay doesn’t glitter, the production moves nimbly, carried along by the cinematography of Vittorio Storaro, the highly competent French cast, and Herbie Hancock’s cool, understated jazz standard “Cantaloupe Island.” 

And the ending still goes to show that Allen, long fascinated with magicians, still knows how to pull a welcome surprise on audiences.

Coup de Chance may well be the last film that Allen completes. Though he told Roger Friedman, in an April interview, that he has two other projects just waiting for someone to finance it, he does not seem to be pressing hard for it.

If this 50^th film in his nearly six-decade career onscreen does turn out to be Allen’s finale, it’s not a bad one to bow out on. Against the odds, he’s come up with a French souffle counterpart to Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point: light, delicate, and sensual.

Flashback, November 1963: Master Filmmaker Kurosawa Caps Crime-Thriller Quartet With ‘High and Low’

International audiences had become accustomed to daringly innovative cinematography and visual storytelling by Japanese writer-director Akira Kurosawa, even when he turned to foreign influences such as the American Western (The Seven Samurai), Dostoevsky (The Idiot), Shakespeare (Throne of Blood), Gorky (The Lower Depths) and Shakespeare (Throne of Blood) for his examinations of his own country’s psychology.

But with High and Low, which premiered in the U.S. 60 years ago this month (and, incidentally, in the week following the JFK assassination), this supremely influential figure in world cinema turned to a genre that had come particularly to fascinate him: the crime thriller, in this case based on the American pulp novel King’s Ransom, by Ed McBain.

Trust me, not every adaptation of one of McBain’s 87th Precinct novels works. As evidence, I submit two 1990’s TV movies in the long-running Columbo series, “Undercover" (based on Jigsaw) and “No Time to Die” (source: So Long As You Both Shall Live), by general agreement of fans of Peter Falk’s rumpled detective the nadir of the series—and the only two stories not written originally for the show.

But Kurosawa did not merely translate the setting of McBain’s police procedural from an American metropolis to Japan. 

By confining the accomplices in the kidnapping to the margins of the story, Kurosawa (who collaborated on the screenplay with Hideo Oguni, Eijiro Hisaita, and Ryuzo Kikushima) concentrated on the relationship between the crime’s ringleader and wealthy industrialist Kingo Gondo (played by Toshiro Mifune, paired with Kurosawa for the 15^th and next to last time)—one with unexpected subtleties and class tensions.

Being most familiar with Kurosawa’s samurai films and historical epics, I was surprised to see how fluidly he handled a contemporary setting. But I may have been even more astonished to learn that High and Low represented his fourth venture into Japanese film noir, following Drunken Angel, Stray Dog, and The Bad Sleep Well.

The environment of this film is far removed from the agrarian world of so many earlier Kurosawa films. By this point in the 1960s, Japan was achieving levels of consumer spending and financial sophistication unimaginable before World War II.

“In Japan, the society progressed through a rapid growth, which was an unnatural process,” Kurosawa remembered. “Daily life lost its natural course. To live, it became necessary to work beyond one's abilities. That's why instability among people has increased.”

In the script that Kurosawa helped fashion from the McBain novel, that “instability” gave rise to a kidnapping, reflecting a frightening national trend of the time. (Kurosawa himself had received kidnapping threats involving his own daughter, Kazuko Kurosawa).

Gondo, a hard-charging footwear tycoon, not only faces a blackmail demand that could bankrupt him—just when he needs the money to fend off an internal coup—but won’t even be paying for his own family member, as the kidnapper has mistakenly snatched the son of Gondo’s chauffeur.

The planned ransom exchange on a bullet train is one of Kurosawa’s most exciting sequences, brisk with motion. But scenes set in Gondo’s home, though stationary, work equally well, as Kurosawa focuses on the tension engulfing Mifune, a normally forceful actor here required to register his emotions with greater restraint.

Over the years, I had come to admire such Kurosawa gems as Rashomon, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, and, of course, The Seven Samurai. But I was pleasantly surprised by his change of pace in High and Low. 

It was the highest-grossing film in Japan in the year of its release, and with its powerful energy and deep moral seriousness, it also happens to be an uncommonly thoughtful thriller.