Anthony Minghella
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Strangers on a Train (1951)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
influenced The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
Themes
The director adapted the script from the 1955 novel by Patricia Highsmith -- whose "Strangers On a Train" became one of Hitchcock's most disquieting classics.
I saw The Talented Mr. Ripley with a friend who had read the book (by Patricia Highsmith, who also wrote Strangers on a Train).
Ripley and his chilling adventures are the subject of five novels by the late Patricia High-smith, whose first book, "Strangers on a Train," was turned into the memorable Alfred Hitchcock film.
Alfred Hitchcock made "Strangers on a Train" (1951), based on one of her books.
And in a performance that should put him solidly in the running for this year's Best Actor Oscar, he not only penetrates to the core of Highsmith's vision (also seen in other excellent films such as Strangers on a Train and Wim Wenders' The American Friend) but adds inspired new strokes to her monstrously beguiling creation.
This time in a grander and more elaborate version, as Tom Ripley (Damon) is made into a closet homosexual and someone capable of killing anyone who interferes with his plans to assume someone else's identity -- which makes the crime thriller take on a slightly different meaning from the way Highsmith intended it (she also wrote the novel for the great Hitchcock film, "Strangers on a Train").
Allied (2016)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
influenced by The English Patient (1996)
Visuals Plot Themes
He’d rather pull off big, showy set pieces like the spectacular opening shot of Max parachuting into the Moroccan desert or the scene in which Max and Marianne consummate their relationship in a car buffeted by a sand storm (a shot shamelessly ripped off from The English Patient).
That old number, you might think—a leftover from The English Patient.
The physical consummation is clear-cut, occurring in the midst of a desert storm in a scene that recalls another 1996 release, Anthony Minghella's The English Patient.
But, for all its echoes of Casablanca and The English Patient, this World War II drama doesn't earn the "iconic" label.
In the film’s best scene, M & M make love inside a car during a sandstorm: It’s like Lawrence of Arabia as a date movie, or maybe The English Patient, only vehicular instead of aerial.
It’s right up there with “Truly Madly Deeply,” in which Alan Rickman returns from the dead to hang with his ex (Juliet Stevenson), only to realize his presence makes things worse.
It’s about love’s link to the afterlife, more Tibetan Book of the Dead than its warm and fuzzy big screen interpretations “Ghost” or “Truly, Madly Deeply.”
Just when you're beginning to wish you were watching "Truly, Madly, Deeply" instead, a motley group of posers takes over, bristling with piercings and pontifications.
Like Truly Madly Deeply and Ghost , it posits what happens when one-half of a couple has shuffled off this mortal coil.
Saltburn (2023)
Directed by Emerald Fennell
influenced by The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
Themes Plot
Drawing from films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley and Teorema, Saltburn wears its inspirations on its sleeve while taking it up a notch.
But those who are expecting a crossover between The Talented Mr. Ripley and Brideshead Revisited will be disappointed, as there is no satisfaction to be gained from watching evil geniuses do their magic, just like there are no hidden motivations to uncover that would justify their actions and make us understand them.
Saltburn is her mash-up of The Secret History and The Talented Mr. Ripley, a dark academia-soaked thriller stuffed with all the classic tropes of the niche aesthetic: extravagant architecture, dusty textbooks, and musky queer-coded young men.
Barry Keoghan is too old to be playing Oliver Quick, an Oxford scholarship student with a mysterious agenda, but I suppose they all are (classmates played by Jacob Elordi and Ewan Mitchell), and that may very well be intentional in what almost seems to be a stab at straightfaced parody of The Talented Mr. Ripley (which was already kinda funny to begin with), set in the malaise of a millennial-era rich teen drama—the boxy screen ratio sure makes it look like a TV show with an artistic eye.
Comparisons will certainly be made to Brideshead Revisited , The Talented Mr. Ripley , and even the works of Donna Tartt.
While watching this film, it was hard for me not to think of The Talented Mr. Ripley .
It has echoes of Vertigo (1958), North By Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960).
"Ripley," which is obsessed with Hitchcock, alludes repeatedly to "Vertigo" and "Psycho," most obviously.
This is sorta kinda like in Hitchcock' overrated "Psycho", or more precisely like in one of my all-time favorites, Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver", in which you also get into the mind of a violent sociopath.
It has echoes of Vertigo (1958), North By Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960).
"Ripley," which is obsessed with Hitchcock, alludes repeatedly to "Vertigo" and "Psycho," most obviously.
Inevitably recalling Lawrence of Arabia with its desert setting and epic sweep, this skilful adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's difficult novel is at heart two love stories, one in the present, the other told in flashback.
It made me think of Lawrence of Arabia several times, and two reviews I read afterward also mentioned Lawrence of Arabia.
With its immense seductiveness, heady romance and glorious desert vistas at the "Lawrence of Arabia" level, "The English Patient" imaginatively lives up to that description.
This mix is the film's biggest aesthetic strength, putting it somewhere on the spectrum of great psychological epics on the Lawrence of Arabia model, movies that successfully use an enormous canvas to paint a human-sized portrait (there are few of these that are genuinely good than you might hope for).
From its opening vistas of a propeller plane cruising over rippled sand dunes, which are photographed to suggest the curves of a woman's body (the images are so honey-rich they make Lawrence of Arabia look shabby), The English Patient is an elegant, accomplished piece of high modernist filmmaking.
It has echoes of Vertigo (1958), North By Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960).
Casablanca (1943)
Directed by Michael Curtiz
influenced The English Patient (1996)
Visuals Characters Themes Plot
Casablanca had such a powerful impact on film that its visuals -- the exotic marketplace, the crowded saloons, the final foggy airport sequence -- keep cropping up in contemporary movies, everything from the Indiana Jones films to The English Patient .
Ralph Fiennes gives us an Almasy who seems loosely based on Casablanca 's Rick -- strong and silent until the right woman releases all of his pent-up passion.
THE DESERT ROMANCE HAS A distinguished history in the movies, from Rudolph Valentino's swan song, "Son of the Sheik," in 1926, through the greatest of them all, in which nary a dune appears: 1942's "Casablanca.
Readers of Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning 1993 novel "The English Patient" might not expect the movie version to follow the lead of "Casablanca," "The Bridges of Madison County" or even "Sleepless in Seattle," but you can see why director-screenwriter Anthony Minghella ("Truly, Madly, Deeply") would make such a choice.
That could have been the whole movie -- a kind of inverse Casablanca.
It's "Casablanca" set amid the swirling Sahara sands of North Africa and the voluptuous hills of Tuscany.
To Catch a Thief (1955)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
influenced The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
Visuals
There's a lot of latter-day Hitch on display here, To Catch a Thief and Frenzy, and even a touch of Ren� Cl�ment, who last adapted the Highsmith novel and called it Plein soleil (Purple Noon).
Of all the film's classic predecessors, "Ghost Town" suffers most when balanced against Anthony Minghella's lovely debut film, "Truly, Madly, Deeply," which elicited deep, naked tremors of feeling from the setup of a woman letting go of her dead husband.
There's a lot of latter-day Hitch on display here, To Catch a Thief and Frenzy, and even a touch of Ren� Cl�ment, who last adapted the Highsmith novel and called it Plein soleil (Purple Noon).
Not since Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now has a film used the patina'd beauty of Italy to such intense psychological effect.
Then there was Wim Wenders better version, "The American Friend (77)," where Dennis Hopper got into the sinister con man's character and showed how his criminal guilt was related to Germany's postwar guilt.
We are reminded of films such as The Wizard of Oz and even The English Patient, but mostly the audience is invited to celebrate the purified wonder of youth and the dazzle of life’s invisible indispensables.
Seventy years later, the book’s influence can be seen in everything from “The English Patient” to “The Lego Movie.”
La Dolce Vita (1960)
Directed by Federico Fellini
influenced The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
Themes Visuals
The impish xylophone riff that plays when Tom tells his lies, the extras whose clothes and postures make them look like escapees from La Dolce Vita, the million little verbal stratagems by which Tom manipulates everyone around him all work together to create a cunning little machine of a movie.
The ever resourceful Tom enjoys la dolce vita to such a great extent that when it looks like the good times will finally end, he masterminds a convoluted plot that he hopes will place him permanently on top.
The carefully selected locations and scenery evoke the mood of La Dolce Vita in the 1950s, the film composition and editing are tight and effective, and the acting performances from Damon and the supporting cast are outstanding.
The impish xylophone riff that plays when Tom tells his lies, the extras whose clothes and postures make them look like escapees from La Dolce Vita, the million little verbal stratagems by which Tom manipulates everyone around him ?
…director Audrey Wells ( Disney's The Kid , George of the Jungle ) from Frances Mayes memoir, reminded me, surprisingly, of Truly Madly Deeply -- it's not so devastating as Anthony Minghella's ghost story, of course, but it follows a similar trail from loss to recovery to redemption, and exudes a similar exhilaration about the rediscovery of life along the way.
Atonement (2007)
Directed by Joe Wright
influenced by The English Patient (1996), Cold Mountain (2003)
Themes
Briony is interviewed by director Anthony Minghella, whose "The English Patient" somewhat resembles "Atonement" in its scope, subject matter and literary ambitions.
Atonement has garnered comparisons to The English Patient, and that's very apt.
Unlike, say, "The English Patient," which possessed an uncanny inner fire, "Atonement," has a dutiful, noble air.
A rich, old-fashioned love story spun out of modern psychology and postmodern storytelling, this film's decades-long, war-torn examination of love, pain, betrayal and, yes, atonement has the kind of expansive sweep that brings "The English Patient" to mind.
There's little doubt that Atonement is destined to receive comparisons to The English Patient, as both films feature a slow, deliberate pace and an epic romance that transpires over the course of several years.
…fully worked out than many other prestige literary adaptations, like Cold Mountain.
My Policeman (2022)
Directed by Michael Grandage
influenced by The English Patient (1996), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
Visuals Plot
Structurally, it faintly recalls The English Patient , while its tone might best be summed up as Merchant Ivory for tweens, whose relative lack of exposure to the film’s pedestrian devices are the only conceivable excuse for indulging in them.
The pair arrive by motorboat, The Talented Mr. Ripley -style, and are nearly caught making out in the street by a passing nun.
Chris has been compared to the unspeakable, seductive title antihero of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, though he’s both less charismatic and more human than Ripley — or at least more fallible, capable of getting nervous and making sloppy mistakes.
Chris' personal and professional path, along with his prognostications on luck, echoes Patricia Highsmith's fictional Ripley character, Thomas Ripley (e.g., The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley's Game), an amoral, sociopathic bi-sexual, social climber, thief, and murderer, and the central character in Strangers on a Train, Guy Haines, a tennis pro who wants to marry for love and social mobility.