Patriciaphernalia: A Signed Patricia Highsmith Letter Regarding Ripley's Game

I've a number of Patricia Highsmith signed books I've been meaning to blog about for bloody ages – years in fact – but the demands of work and life have meant that my blogging activity has largely been restricted to whichever books I've written or edited myself. However, I'm hoping to make more time for Existential Ennui besides simply blogging about whichever project I'm working on – case in point being my post the other day on Patrick Gierth – and have every intention of getting to those signed Highsmiths soon (and adding them to my dedicated Patricia Highsmith page). First, though, I want to showcase something even more remarkable:

A note Highsmith wrote on 9 February, 1975, regarding her "third Tom Ripley" as she puts it – in other words, 1974's Ripley's Game. The third in Highsmith's five-book Ripliad, Ripley's Game is, as I've noted many, many times, my favourite novel, not just of hers but full stop. I've never managed to secure a signed edition – though I do own a 1974 US Knopf first with an owner inscription by James Bond/Ian Fleming biographer John Pearson – so when I saw this note offered for sale I knew I had to have it so I could pair it with my 1974 Heinemann first edition of Ripley's Game (the book which began my book-collecting odyssey).

Addressed from Highsmith's then-residence in the village of Moncourt, France, where she wrote both Ripley's Game and the next book in the Ripliad, 1980's The Boy Who Followed Ripley (a signed US edition of which I blogged about back in 2017), the note is penned in response to a missive from one Peter Ladkin. An inveterate letter writer judging by the number of other examples of his author letters offered for sale at the same time (he also corresponded with the philosopher and LSE Professor John Watkins), Mr. Ladkin had evidently written approvingly of Ripley's Game, eliciting the following response from Highsmith:

Dear Mr Ladkin,

Don't worry about sending me the cost of return postage. I thank you very much for your remarks about my work and am glad you enjoyed my third Tom Ripley.

Yours sincerely

Patricia Highsmith

As the mention of "return postage" suggests, Mr. Ladkin had also seemingly requested Highsmith's signature and an accompanying inscription, which she duly supplied on a separate piece of paper, presumably so it could be used as a bookplate:

So there we have it: two notes regarding Ripley's Game, written from the house where Patricia Highsmith wrote that novel. Quite the pair of pieces of Patriciaphernalia for a Highsmith/Ripley's Game obsessive like myself.

A Ripley's Game Reprise: 1974 US Knopf First Edition of Patricia Highsmith's Third Tom Ripley Novel

What scant posts there have been on here of late have been to do with comics – those are, after all, what have been preoccupying me both personally and professionally over the past year or so – but I have been picking up the odd book here and there too, and among those have been a number by another perennial preoccupation of mine, Patricia Highsmith. Just the other day I came into possession of this:

An American first edition of Ripley's Game, published by Knopf in 1974, dust jacket design by Janet Halverson (whose other jackets include the 1970 and 1978 US firsts of Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt and The Human Factor, and the 1981 US first of Ross Thomas's The Mordida Man). You may recall... actually at this point I doubt anyone recalls anything I've written on Existential Ennui, but anyway: Ripley's Game, the third book in the Ripliad (soon to become a TV show, with Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley – intriguing and encouraging casting there), is not only my favourite Highsmith novel, but my favourite novel full stop, and it was the acquisition of a 1974 Heinemann first a dozen years ago (in a long-since-vanished Cecil Court bookshop) that first got me into book collecting. As such, it's a totemic book for me.

I had my eye on a Knopf first six years ago, but it slipped through my fingers (as compensation I settled instead for a 1989 Heinemann Uniform Edition). The notion of getting my filthy mitts on a Knopf (ooer) has floated in and out of my head ever since then, but just the other day it seemed the fates had finally aligned when I was in Lewes's Bow Windows Bookshop and co-proprietor (and friend of mine) Ric mentioned he'd come into possession of one as part of a box of books – mostly crime fiction and spy fiction – he'd bought from a local. Or at least he thought he had: when we looked in said box, there was no sign of Ripley's Game. Bugger.

I'd pretty much resigned myself to the fact that once again the Knopf first had eluded my grasp when two days later Ric sent me a message saying he'd found it. And it turned out that not only was it a first edition (not a later printing – the Knopf edition went through a few), but it was once owned by local author John Pearson, he of James Bond: The Authorized Biography and The Life of Ian Fleming fame.

So I'm very happy with my copy (even though the dust jacket is a little battered: the sign of a well-read book, whether by Mr. Pearson or whoever it was Ric bought it off – and quite right too), not least because it affords me the opportunity to compare the US and UK first editions. The text in the Knopf edition, which was published in May of '74, a few months after the Heinemann edition, has been Americanised, or I suppose – depending on whether Highsmith, who was American, wrote the manuscript in American English – re-Americanised: within the first few sentences, there's a "parlor game" as opposed to "parlour game" in the Heinemann edition.

The Knopf has deckled edges, as is often the case with American editions, and a red-stained top block. I also rather like the jacket flap description of Tom Ripley as "energetic, amoral, overcivilized" and "undersensitized".

Now I suppose I'll have to write something abut the other Highsmith books I've picked up – especially as they're all signed.

Signed Inscribed Tom Ripley Books: Patricia Highsmith's Ripley Under Ground and The Boy Who Followed Ripley

I'm of a mind to post some of the signed books I've acquired over the past year or two – at least, I'm of a mind as I type this; whether or not I'll remain of a mind to do so, or indeed retain any enthusiasm for blogging whatsoever, remains to be seen. For now, though, here's a pair of signed Patricia Highsmith books, both of which are novels in my abiding obsession, the Tom Ripley series.

On the left is a 1970 US Doubleday Book Club Edition of Ripley Under Ground, the second novel in the five-book Ripliad, and on the right a 1980 US Lippincott & Crowell first edition of The Boy Who Followed Ripley, the fourth novel in the Ripliad. The dust jacket design on Ripley Under Ground is by Alex Gotfryd, while the dust jacket design on The Boy Who Followed Ripley is by Pat Voehl.

Ripley Under Ground has been signed, inscribed ("Best to you") and dated (19 May 1981) by Patricia Highsmith on the half-title page – in pencil, unusually (every other signed Highsmith book I own – a dozen in total – has been signed in pen). As noted, it's a book club edition, which ordinarily would make it less interesting to me, but it's the only signed copy of Ripley Under Ground – not just one of my favourite novels in the Ripliad but one of my favourite Highsmiths, and therefore one of my favourite novels, full stop – in any edition I've ever come across, so it's a remarkable thing indeed.

The Boy Who Followed Ripley is an association copy, signed by Highsmith on the front free endpaper and inscribed to Lou Kannenstine – or rather "Kannenstein", as Highmith has misspelled it. Kannenstine, who died in 2014, was the publisher of Foul Play Press, an imprint of Countryman Press which issued crime and mystery novels by, among others, Reginald Hill, Max Allan Collins and another abiding preoccupation of mine, Donald E. Westlake (the three Grofield novels written as Richard Stark).

I've added both books to the Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery (under 'Patriciaphernalia'), where my inscribed association copy of the fifth Ripley novel, Ripley Under Water, also resides – meaning I now own three-fifths of the Ripliad in signed editions (two copies in the case of Ripley Under Water). And if the mood takes me, I'll be posting some other signed Highsmiths soon.

A Tom Ripley and Ripliad Chronology: a Timeline in Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (Virago, 2015)

NB: Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 7/8/15.

When a series of novels – especially a series published over an extended period and featuring the same lead character throughout – evolves in the mind of the reader from being merely a diversion or, at the upper end of the scale of interest, a fascination, to becoming a full-blown obsession, the minutiae of the fictional world being depicted starts to assume more of an importance than it perhaps otherwise would (or should). Take a particular passion of mine: the five Patricia Highsmith novels starring Tom Ripley – the Ripliad. Aspects of Tom's world to which I've devoted more thought than is entirely necessary (or healthy) include Tom's politics (leftish, for the most part), the social scene around his home in Villeperce-sur-Seine (agreeable, for the most part, although also snobbish) and the state of Tom's garden at Belle Ombre (a curious one that, when I struggle to summon much interest in my own garden beyond a desire to sit in it on occasion). But probably the facet of the Ripliad I've pondered most frequently is its chronology.

In publishing terms, Highsmith's intermittent series spans thirty-six years, from 1955's The Talented Mr. Ripley to 1991's Ripley Under Water, and the world depicted in each novel reflects the era in which it was written, from the 1950s mise-en-scene of Tom's debut to the presence of CDs and microwave ovens in his swansong. But in the internal chronology of the series, little more than a decade elapses between The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ripley Under Water. We're told in the the novels that Tom is twenty-five years old at the time of Talented; that he's thirty-one in the second instalment in the Ripliad, 1970's Ripley Under Ground; and that the events of Ripley Under Water take place about five years on from Under Ground – which, if Talented is indeed set in 1955, would mean that Under Water is set in 1966. And yet the world outside Belle Ombre's windows marches on through the 1970s and into the early 1990s.

Fellow Ripley enthusiast Craig D noted in the comments to my Tom Ripley Reread post on Ripley Under Ground that he "once read an interview with Highsmith in which she... jokingly [said] that she 'cheated' with the timeline", so I suppose one really shouldn't read too much into the mutable nature of the Ripliad chronology. But of course that doesn't prevent unhinged individuals like myself from dwelling on it – and nor does it stop other folk from offering their own interpretations of it.

One such recent one, the most detailed I've come across – it proffers season as well as year for when each novel is set, plus locales – appears in the 2015 Virago hardback edition of The Talented Mr. Ripley (a copy of which was kindly sent to me by Virago's Editorial Director Donna Coonan, to whom I can only apologise for the ridiculously nitpicky nature of what follows), appended to John Sutherland's new introduction to the novel. On one level it's an entirely reasonable piece of work: each of the dates it gives is informed by the surroundings in each novel – which, as I've noted, reflect the period in which each novel was written – and certainly in the case of Ripley Under Ground and 1974's Ripley's Game, the chronology further reflects the info Highsmith imparts in the latter: that just six months elapse between those two books.

Where the chronology starts to become problematic – at least for a lunatic like me – is in the concrete dates it gives for the four novels post-Talented (which the chronology maintains is "set in early 1955", which is fair enough). For Ripley Under Ground and Ripley's Game, the settings are given as, respectively, "summer 1968" and "late 1968 and early 1969", which tallies roughly with when the novels were written but would make Tom around thirty-eight, as opposed to the thirty-one he says he is. The fourth book in the Ripliad, 1980's The Boy Who Followed Ripley, I don't believe offers any indication of how long after Ripley's Game it's set (I could be wrong; it's two years since I last reread it), but the chronology states it's "set in summer and early autumn 1978", which would make Tom about forty-eight – markedly older than the novel seems to suggest he is. Lastly, the date for Ripley Under Water is stated as "summer and autumn 1988"; that would make Tom an unlikely fifty-eight and mean that thirty-three years have elapsed since the events of Talented.

There's no easy answer to this: Highsmith evidently did cheat, so it's impossible to reconcile the setting and surroundings of each novel with Tom's age in each. But by affixing such (relatively) firm dates to each book, the new chronology practically invites the scrutiny of those of us for whom the Ripliad has become, let's say, an abiding preoccupation.

Still, for the vast majority of the readership, who I imagine tend not to dwell on such things – which is to say they have a firmer grasp on reality and more of a sense of perspective than I seem to – the chronology will doubtless prove to be little more than a momentary diversion. And at least it's not as problematic as the year the otherwise learned Professor Sutherland calculates in his introduction for Tom's birth: 1934. Now how on earth did he arrive at that conclusion...?

The Real Tom Ripley? Origins of Patricia Highsmith's Talented Mr. Ripley

A couple of years ago, in this post on The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980) – the third novel in the five-book Ripliad – I noted that Patricia Highsmith identified with Tom Ripley more than any other character she created. In her guidebook Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966) she wrote of Tom's debut, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), "No book was easier for me to write, and I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing," while later novels in the Ripliad, The Boy Who Followed Ripley among them, are littered with opinions and asides that are ostensibly Tom's but in fact recognisably those of his creator. Highsmith was even known to sign letters to friends, "Tom".

But Highsmith drew on other sources besides herself in her formulation of Tom Ripley. Andrew Wilson, in his 2003 biography of the author, Beautiful Shadow, points to Julian Green's 1947 body-swapping fantasy If I Were You and Henry James's 1903 novel The Ambassadors as two literary inspirations for Tom and The Talented Mr. Ripley. He also highlights a real life inspiration: a Herald Tribune news story that Highsmith read in 1954 about a man "presumed dead after the discovery of a charred body" who "was spotted drinking after his 'funeral' and... arrested". But there's another real life inspiration for Tom, one that Highsmith herself wrote about in an essay for the Winter 1989 issue (#29) of literary journal Granta.

Titled Scene of the Crime, the essay recaps the events of The Talented Mr. Ripley before turning to "the place where Ripley was born," as Highsmith puts it, "in the sense of being a story-less image in my memory". The place is Positano on the Amalfi Coast, which Highsmith visited for the first time in late summer 1951. (Wilson's biography contradicts this, stating that Highsmith first visited Positano in late summer 1949.) Emerging onto the balcony of her hotel one quiet morning Highsmith "noticed a solitary young man in shorts and sandals with a towel flung over his shoulder, making his way along the beach from right to left. He was looking downward... I could just see that his hair was straight and darkish." She continues:

There was an air of pensiveness about him, maybe unease. And why was he alone? He did not look like the athletic type who would take a cold swim alone at an early hour. Had he quarrelled with someone? What was on his mind? I never saw him again. I did not even write anything in my cahier about him. What would there have been to say? He looked like a thousand other American tourists in Europe that summer. I had the feeling that he was American.

The image of the solitary young man returned to Highsmith months later on her second trip to Europe when an idea for a story occurred to her, "...of a young American drifter being sent to Europe to bring another American back home, if possible". (Highsmith admits at this point the similarity of her notion to The Ambassadors.) Yet when she actually came to write The Talented Mr. Ripley, she was "not sure that the Positano beach image with the solitary figure even came to my mind", although Positano itself made it into the novel – and onto the dust jacket of the 1957 British first edition – as Mongibello. It was only "years later [when] journalists asked me, 'Where did you get the idea of Ripley from?' and as I racked my mind to answer, to recall exactly where, [that] the solitary figure on the beach returned to me, and I described his appearance – as I had seen it from two hundred metres or more".

Highsmith writes in closing:

The stretch of the Positano beach, which has not changed much except that it may now hold a few more boats or people, has no particular fascination for me. Ripley was not really born there, was just an image for me, and needed another element to spring to life: imagination, which came many months later.

A Tom Ripley / Ripliad TV Series, and Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley: British First Edition (Cresset Press, 1957)

Obsessive Patricia Highsmith/Tom Ripley nut that I am, it would be remiss of me, I feel, not to comment in some fashion on the recent(ish) news that Highsmith's Ripliad could well be heading for television. Except that, as yet, there's not much to comment on. The Hollywood Reporter reports that the proposed series is to be produced in partnership with Highsmith's literary executor, Diogenes Verlag, with Philipp Keel – son of the late Daniel Keel, founder of Diogenes – serving as an executive producer, and that the "vision for the TV series is to expand on Rene Clement's 1960 feature Purple Moon and Anthony Minghella's Matt Damon-starrer The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) – both of which were based on the first book in the series – and explore the depth, sophistication and complexity of the character of Tom Ripley". But the magazine does also state that the producers will be bringing not just The Talented Mr. Ripley to television but Highsmith's "five-book series", so there's reason to suppose that the Ripliad as a whole will be televised.

I'll be keeping a keen eye on developments there, but in a curious case of coincidence, one of which Highsmith herself would surely have approved, shortly before the announcement of the Ripley TV series I finally got my hands on a copy of the one Ripley book – indeed the one book above all others – that I've had at the top of my wants list ever since I started collecting books:

A British first edition of The Talented Mr. Ripley, published by the Cresset Press in 1957. Now, I should point out that while the book is the genuine article – a first impression of the British first edition, as denoted by the title and copyright pages:

– the dust jacket, well, isn't. It's a facsimile dust jacket, which I ordered from the appropriately named Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC after winning the book on eBay for not much more than fifty quid – an absolute bargain considering the cheapest jacketless copy of the Cresset edition currently on AbeBooks is an ex-library affair with both endpapers removed (and replaced) offered at north of £100. And even factoring in the price of the facsimile jacket, which set me back an additional twenty quid (including shipping from America), it's still quite the steal, especially when the only other facsimile jacketed copy of the book on AbeBooks at present is priced at £175. (British first editions in their original jackets are more like £700–£1,000.)

Value aside, though, the real pleasure for me, as a Highsmith and Ripley fanatic, comes in simply owning the thing – the one Ripley novel that I didn't own in British first, and one of only two Highsmith novels that I didn't own in British first (the other being Strangers on a Train, Highsmith's debut). Oh, I own other editions of The Talented Mr. Ripley which I prize – a lovely 1960 Pan paperback, a striking 1959 Dell paperback, a 1973 Heinemann hardback – but to finally have in my hands – and, when it's not in my hands, on my Highsmith shelf – a true British first of the novel, even one in a facsimile jacket, is especially thrilling.

The dust jacket design is uncredited – it could be the work of Joan Hassall, Kenneth Rowntree, Hugh Walker or possibly even Hans Tisdall, all of whom were designing wrappers for Cresset Press around this period – or it could be none of those designers – so I've added it to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s under 'Designer Unknown'. In the Existential Ennui Patricia Highsmith First Edition Book Cover Gallery, however, it has assumed its proper place in between my Cresset Press edition of The Blunderer and Heinemann edition of Deep Water.

Tom Ripley has been much in the news of late, no doubt in part for the reasons outlined at the start of this post, but he's also been much on my mind – even more so than usual – and not merely because of the proposed TV show. Obviously my acquisition of this copy of The Talented Mr. Ripley is one reason for that, but I've also acquired a very special copy of a later Ripley novel, one which I'll be writing about before too long, plus I came across an article, written by Patricia Highsmith in 1989, on the real life inspiration for Tom. And I'll be blogging about that article soon.

Ripley's Game and The American Friend: the Films and the Book (by Patricia Highsmith)

To round off what's become quite a protracted run of posts on Patricia Highsmith – links to previous missives in the run can be found at the bottom of this post, should anyone be remotely interested – I thought I'd take a look at two different film adaptations of my favourite of Highsmith's novels – indeed my favourite novel full stop: the third Tom Ripley novel, Ripley's Game (1974). One of those film adaptations, the eponymous 2002 version, directed by Liliana Cavani, I've seen a few times over the years (and watched again recently); the other, Wim Wenders' The American Friend (1977), I only saw for the first time last week. To be honest I was in two minds as to whether or not to post anything about either of them – there are doubtless plenty of reviews already available online. But what there doesn't seem to be so much of is comparison between the two and to the source text, and so here, for what they're worth, are some notes and thoughts along those lines.

For a start, though derived from the same source and following essentially the same story, The American Friend and Ripley's Game are very different films – the former a, for want of a better term, arthouse film, the latter I guess an old school Euro-thriller, albeit one directed by ostensibly an arthouse director (Cavani's credits include 1974's The Night Porter). I suppose one illustration of this might be how each film handles the pivotal scene early on where Jonathan Trevanny – in the book and in Cavani's film; in Wenders' film he's Jonathan Zimmerman – unwittingly makes a nemesis of Tom Ripley. Cavani correctly locates this scene in Jonathan's kitchen during a party, but then embellishes it, depicting a drunken Jonathan – played by Dougray Scott – deriding Tom's lack of taste to a cabal of cackling cronies, only for Tom – John Malkovich – to overhear and icily challenge him. Wenders relocates the scene to an auction room, but has Bruno Ganz as Jonathan underplay the offhand slight in the same fashion as the novel: upon being introduced to Tom – played by Dennis Hopper – Jonathan ignores Tom's proffered hand and mutters, "Oh yes, I've heard of you."

On the commentary track on the DVD of The American Friend Wim Wenders remarks of this scene, "That's what I love about Patricia Highsmith, to invent a whole story out of such a little incident: a man's pride is hurt." It's clear that Wenders is something of a fan of Highsmith, but Ripley's Game wasn't his first choice of her novels to adapt. His favourite Highsmith novel was The Cry of the Owl (1962), but the film rights to that book weren't available – and nor were the rights to his second favourite Highsmith novel, The Tremor of Forgery (1969), or his third favourite, or fourth, and so on. Eventually he met Highsmith and she explained that the only novel of hers where the rights were still available was the one she had just finished, because no one else had read it yet. She then pulled the manuscript of Ripley's Game out of her bag.

Cavani was also a Highsmith fan prior to filming her version of the book – "I love Patricia Highsmith and have read most of her books," she told an audience at the Boston International Festival of Women's Film in 2003 – but unlike Wenders she didn't actively pursue a Highsmith novel herself; Ripley's Game was brought to her by producer Ileen Maisel. What Cavani isn't a fan of, however, is Wenders' film. She told the film critic Gerald Peary: "I saw the Wenders film when it came out, but I didn’t like it very much. I don’t think Wenders quite centred on what Highsmith meant. He’d almost fallen in love with this cowboy character. It’s a reflection of those years, the 1970s, German directors discovering American directors and writers."

Highsmith herself wasn't exactly enamoured of Dennis Hopper's Stetson-wearing Ripley either – at least not at first; after an initially adverse reaction to The American Friend she later wrote to Wenders and admitted that she'd been wrong, even to the extent that she thought Hopper had captured the essence of Ripley, the soul of the character. I can kind of see what she means in some scenes, especially the first encounter between Tom and Jonathan in the latter's picture-framing shop: for me that's where Hopper is closest to the Ripley of the page – his reserved nature, the way he smiles at Jonathan. It's no coincidence that that was actually the first scene Hopper shot in the film: in those early days of the production he was sticking closest to the Tom of the novel and of Wenders' original script; thereafter his performance became more improvisational, while Wenders for his part was rewriting daily, the two striving to reach the "truth" of the character as they saw him.

According to Liliana Cavani there was plenty of rewriting on Ripley's Game too – she worked extensively on the script with the screenwriter, Charles McKeown – but at least in terms of that script there was apparently no improvisation on the part of Malkovich. How much of his performance was down to the writing, the direction or his own choices I couldn't say, but certainly Tom's malevolence is brought to the fore, Malkovich casually issuing threats to all and sundry (something the Tom of the books would never do) and even at one point providing (to Jonathan) a pithy summary of his character as the filmmakers saw him: "I'm a creation. A gifted improviser. I lack your conscience and, when I was young, that troubled me. It no longer does. I don't worry about being caught because I don't think anyone is watching."

A creation... a gifted improviser... lack of conscience: all this sounds like the Tom of the books, but what is lacking in Malkovich's portrayal is Tom's unexpected gregariousness and warmth. In the Ripliad people genuinely seem to like Tom; in Ripley's Game (the film) only his wife does, although arguably Jonathan warms to him. It's hard to imagine anyone else doing so though – and almost as hard to imagine anyone warming to Dennis Hopper's Tom: a loner with a penchant for recording his own rambling thoughts on dictaphone and reel-to-reel, living in a dilapidated city mansion lit by neon signs and flickering TV screens. Though again Jonathan does warm to Tom, even more so than in Cavani's version.

On the commentary track for The American Friend Wenders notes that he originally thought of John Cassavetes for the role of Ripley, which would have been interesting. In the event Cassavetes passed and suggested Hopper instead – another film actor who also directed. And in fact Wenders cast a number of film actor-directors and directors in the movie, all of them playing ne'er-do-wells of one type or another. The French actor-director Gérard Blain plays Tom's criminal associate Raoul Minot (Reeves Minot in the Ripliad); Sam Fuller, of Shock Corridor fame, plays the gangster Jonathan is supposed to murder on the train (with Tom's assistance); and Nicholas Ray plays Derwatt, the painter-forger Tom is in league with.

Ripliad enthusiasts might raise an eyebrow at that last one, because Derwatt is actually a character from the previous Tom Ripley novel, Ripley Under Ground. He's not a forger in that novel either; he's a deceased painter who is forged by another painter, Bernard Tufts. I was a little surprised when I learned prior to watching The American Friend that Wenders had stapled some of the art forgery elements of Ripley Under Ground onto Ripley's Game – why would he do such a thing? – but his casting of his friend Nicholas Ray provides the explanation. Wenders reveals on the American Friend commentary track that Ray was dying – he finally passed away in 1979 – and that as a consequence Wenders wanted to get Ray into his film somehow. Unfortunately there was no part suitable for Ray, until Wenders thought of bringing Derwatt into the story.

Curiously, Cavani's Ripley's Game also introduces elements of art forgery: the film opens with Tom and Reeves – the latter played with sweary East End barrow-boy abandon by Ray Winstone, nothing like the Reeves of the books but immensely enjoyable nonetheless – selling forged paintings in Berlin, the funds from which Tom uses to buy a palatial villa in Italy – one which in truth is no closer to the more modest Belle Ombre of the books than Dennis Hopper's weird mansion in The American Friend. Jonathan lives in quite a nice gaff in the Ripley's Game film too, which on his wages I found slightly hard to believe, until I recalled how much some of the picture framers around Lewes charge.

Bruno Ganz's Jonathan, on the other hand, lives with his family adjacent to Hamburg's docks (like Cavani Wenders relocates the story from the novels' rural France) in a cramped apartment, one more befitting his evidently modest means. For me, Ganz gives the performance of either film. He's a more believable Jonathan than Dougray Scott for sure, but in his quiet and unassuming way he also outshines Dennis Hopper's chaotic turn in The American Friend and John Malkovich's dominating performance in Ripley's Game. I would say he's worth the price of admission alone, but The American Friend has much to recommend it besides, as does Ripley's Game, not least the aforementioned train sequence, which in both films is terrifically handled: thrilling, gruesome, darkly comic, and arresting in the moment, replicated in each film, where Jonathan tests the garrotte on himself. In general I don't think you could class either film as an especially faithful adaptation of the source material, but the gusto with which they both attack the same vital sequence speaks volumes to the passion of the filmmakers for their respective projects.

NB: German American Friend poster by Sickert filched from Mean Sheets.

Previous Patricia Highsmith posts in this run: 

Patricia Highsmith's Short Stories: Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, Signed Inscribed Association First Edition

Patricia Highsmith's Short Stories: The Black House, Signed Inscribed Association First Edition with Handwritten Letter

Donald E. Westlake on Patricia Highsmith and Ripley Under Ground (the Film)

A Suspension of Mercy: Book Review

Ripley's Game: 1989 Uniform Edition

Those Who Walk Away: Book Review