1) He loved Patricia Highsmith's 'Strangers On A Train' with its homosexual sub text and 'men changing places'. 2) This had scenes of exquisite suspense of the white-knuckle variety 3) the whole story was a playground for the Hitchcock fetishistic imagination and themes. I had never even heard of Hitch considering the Ripley novels and I am very surprised.
shareI'm surprised too. It's very Hitchcockian.
Make a move, Reindeer Games..
I would've loved to have seen another Highsmith film from Hitchcock. I've always said that The Talented Mr. Ripley was one of the closest (and best) modern-day "Hitchcockian" films I've ever seen.
Anthony Minghella played with fractured psyches and troubled personas by using lots of mirrors and reflections in a similar way Hitchcock did in films like Psycho and Vertigo.
maybe because someone made purple noon first?
sharePerhaps it was too similar to "Strangers on a Train" and he didn't want to be accused of repeating himself, perhaps Jean Archimbaud got the rights to the story first or Hitch just didnt want to make the same story as a French director.
But you're right, if only he'd made it instead of "The Man Who Knew Too Much", or "Marnie"! Come to think of it, if Hitch had taken an interest in the story in the early 1960s, he actually would have had a good role for Hedren... but that would have meant following in another director's footsteps.