The Great Movies III

The murders take place on a train, and play with a precision just one gruesome step this side of slapstick. "Hold my watch," Ripley tells Trevanny before the killing starts, "because if it breaks I'll kill everyone on this train."At one point there are five people, three apparently dead, in the same train toilet. We are poised between a massacre and the Marx Brothers. "It never used to be so crowded in first class," Ripley observes. Although the murders seem to be successful, Reeves and violence follow Ripley back to Italy, and in a masterful sequence using the vast lawns and interiors of the villa, Ripley prepares to greet any visitors. He is not usually capable of being surprised, but watch his eyes when Trevanny turns up to help out.

Women are an enigma in Ripley's world. He treats his wife with studious but not passionate regard, sends her out of the way when danger threatens, has apparently found a woman who never wonders how he makes his money. About Trevanny's wife, Sarah (Lena Headey), he is-well, considerate, to a degree. Sarah doesn't like or trust Ripley. When she walks in on a bloodbath, it's curiously touching the way Trevanny tells her, "It's not what you think!"

The pairing of Ripley and Trevanny joins a man capable of killing and another who doesn't think of himself in those terms. It resembles the pairing in Highsmith's first novel, Strangers on a Train, which inspired the 1951 Hitchcock masterpiece. In both cases, the dominant character has someone he wishes dead and wants to involve the unwilling second man in the killing. Strangers on a Train reflected one of Hitchcock's favorite themes, The Innocent Man Wrongly Accused. By the end of Ripley's Game, Trevanny is accused of nothing but has lost his innocence. Lost it, and seems almost grateful, as if proud to have passed the test Ripley set for him.

If this film had been released as intended in 2002, it would probably have made my ten-best list. Incredibly, it never opened theatrically in the United States; it finally turned up on cable in late 2003. It's said that its distributor, the Fine Line imprint of New Line, was so overwhelmed by the studio's Lord of the Rings trilogy that staff couldn't be spared to focus on it. What American audiences lost was one of Malkovich's most brilliant and insidious performances; a study in evil that teases the delicate line between heartlessness and the faintest glimmers of feeling. When Ripley smiles in the last shot, he hasn't lost his credentials as a psychopath, but he has at last found something in human nature capable of surprising and even (can it be?) delighting him.

can Renoir's The River (1951) begins with a circle being drawn in rice paste on the floor of a courtyard, and the circular patterns continue. In an opening scene, the children of a British family in India peer through porch railings at a newcomer arriving next door. At the end, the same children, less one, peer through the same railing at a departure. The porch overlooks a river, "which has its own life," and as the river flows and the seasons wheel in their appointed order, the Hindu festivals punctuate the year and all flows from life to death to rebirth, as it must.

The film is one of the simplest and most beautiful by Jean Renoir (1894-1979), among the greatest of directors. Based on the novel by Rumer Godden, who was born in India and lived there many years, it remembers her childhood seen through the eyes of a young girl named Harriet (Patricia Walters), who falls in love with the new neighbor. He is Captain John (Thomas E. Breen), an American who lost a leg in the war and now has come to live with his cousin, Mr. John (Arthur Shields).

We meet Harriet's family: her parents, her three sisters, her brother Bogey. We also meet Mr. John's daughter, Melanie (Radha), whose Hindu mother has died, and Valerie (Adrienne Corti), whose father owns the jute factory that Harriett's father manages. There are others: the family's nanny, the young Indian man who courts Melanie, the Sikh gatekeeper, the young Indian boy who is Bogey's playmate.

Although the film covers one year, the impression is of an endless summer day during which the girls play and write in their journals, observe the flow of life outside their gates, and are fascinated by Captain John. At the time of the Hindu festival of light, there is a little party at the family home with music from a wind-up phonograph, and each of the older girls asks Captain John to dance before he finally settles in a corner with Valerie. It becomes clear to young Harriet, despite her crush on the captain, that he has eyes for the red-haired Valerie. What she does not notice is that he is also attracted to his half-Indian cousin, Melanie, and she to him. One day both Melanie and Harriet follow Valerie and Captain John out into a grove, where they kiss. "It was my first kiss," Harriet remembers, "but received by another." Melanie must have felt the same.