"The aloofness, erudite manner, cool charisma and chilly superciliousness of his screen persona makes [Malkovich] a perfect fit" for the Ripley character, Rooney wrote after catching Liliana Cavani's film at last September's Venice Film festival. "And the actor dominates every scene with his deliciously sinister portrayal of a man of mordant wit and supreme manipulative power, able to remain cool in even the most extreme circumstances."

Rooney didn't do somersaults over the film itself, which is taken from the same Highsmith book that Wenders adapted for THE AMERICAN FRIEND, but he certainly gave it a pass. He called it an "efficient adult entertainment" with "an enjoyable retro feel that recalls the British cold war thrillers of the '60s." He added that Cavani "handles the action, atmosphere and tension with assurance, faltering only in a closing act that seems to fumble for a suitable ending."

Rachel Deahl, critic for BOX-OFFICE magazine, called RIPLEY "an unusually smart entry in to the thriller/mystery genre" and that "Malkovich's biting one-liners coupled with his layered portrayal of this deviant, hopelessly fun character makes this a more than memorable experience."

So why after showing it at festivals last year and having screenings for long-lead journalists, did Fine Line suddenly drop this film like a bad habit?

"I don't know why they're bailing," says the head of a major indie distribution company. "It's a really good movie, and it's really fun."

The answer's a little tricky but here's a stab. It comes from executive producer Russell Smith, a longtime partner of Malkovich and a co-owner of their production company called Mr. Mudd. Smith is currently trying to interest other distributors in buying RIPLEY before Fine Line puts together some kind of panicky cash-out deal that will result in a possible debut on HBO instead of in theatres.

Smith says the pull-back decision was "a political thing inside Fine Line that was between the people in foreign sales and domestic." When Fine Line got involved in late '01, the expectation was that RIPLEY, trading on the lore of the Damon film, which earned over $80 million in U.S. theatres, and the whole Ripley-Highsmith thing, would bring in about $15 million in Europe alone.

But soon after this the European TV industry, which Smith says had long been "the great after-market" for European-made features, began to collapse. The implosion reached a critical stage in early May '02 when German media baron Leo Kirsch filed for bankruptcy. "When Kirsch went down, the TV market went down with him," says Smith, and with that Fine Line's hopes for earning back anything close to $15 million.

This shifted the burden to Fine Line's domestic division to bring in as much RIPLEY dough as possible. This would have meant that if and when RIPLEY were to tank at the U.S. box-office, the blame would have fallen upon Fine Line chief Mark Ordesky and not on the international guys.

And this on top of indications RIPLEY might not be the performer Fine Line had hoped for (it didn't do very well when it opened in Italy a couple of months ago) plus the prospect of having to invest $8 to $10 million in prints and ads for the U.S. release, persuaded Ordesky to cut bait.

That's one scenario, at least. Ordesky, who could have offered another, didn't return calls.

Dougray Scott has the role of Ripley's dupe in RIPLEY'S GAME -- the frame-maker played by Bruno Ganz in THE AMERICAN FRIEND. Lina Heady plays Scott's wife, and Ray Winstone has the role played (I think) by Gerard Blaine in the Wenders version.

I'm not the only journalist pining for RIPLEY, according to Smith. ROLLING STONE's Peter Travers, who apparently saw it and liked it at the Hampton's Film Festival last summer, has been badgering Fine Line publicity about they're not releasing it, especially in a period as barren as the one we're in now. (Travers didn't return my calls either, but a Fine Line publicist confirmed he's been complaining.)

And ESQUIRE film critic Tom Carson, according to Smith, has flagged Malkovich's Ripley as a possible '04 Oscar contender.

Boston-area viewers have an opportunity to see RIPLEY'S GAME tonight and tomorrow night at the Boston International Festival for Women's Cinema. It'll screen at Cambridge's Brattle Theatre at 7:30 pm this evening and on Saturday at 10 pm. If I could afford a ticket I'd go -- why not? Smith says Cavani will be attending as an honored guest.

Cavani is best known for THE NIGHT PORTER ('74), a drama about a kinky sado-masochistic relationship between a former Nazi concentration-camp officer (Dirk Bogarde) and a young Jewish woman (Charlotte Rampling) he saves from death because he loves her and wants to ravage her, and she's into it.

I'll never forget something film critic Andrew Sarris wrote about THE NIGHT PORTER. In describing the perverse erotic mood, the former VILLAGE VOICE critic said Cavani had created a kind of stylistic atmosphere he called "homosexual Nazi chic."

I called around yesterday morning to see if any other distributors had taken a look at RIPLEY'S GAME, and were perhaps thinking about adopting it. A guy I spoke to at one of the companies said he'd seen early it earlier this year and "didn't like it very much." The head of a well-known Manhattan-based indie distribution company said he hadn't heard about RIPLEY's availability, but that he plans to look into it.

That's what I was told, anyway. When I passed along this reaction along to Smith, he said, "Oh, come on!"

Does anyone have a spare round-trip ticket to Boston lying around, leaving tonight and returning Sunday? Otherwise, it'll be months before I have another shot at this thing.

In the meantime I'm left with two favorite Ripley moments, both provided by Dennis Hopper in THE AMERICAN FRIEND. That shot of him lying on a pool table as he takes one picture after another of himself with a Polaroid, the photos gradually collecting on his chest and around his neck. And that voice-over he says near the beginning: "I know less and less about who I am, or who anyone else is."

Bad As It Gets

Is A MAN APART (New Line) the worst film of the year so far? I wouldn't know. I generally avoid the big stinkers (even when they're showing on a plane, I turn away) so I'm not the best guy to ask. I know it's a D-grade thing at best. It reminded me of one of those awful Cannon movies Charles Bronson made in the early to mid '80s when he was getting old and looking to keep those checks rolling in.

Diesel plays a hot-dog DEA cop of some kind whose wife gets killed by some baddies he's been busting and threatening, so he goes after some revenge on his own. It's pretty much the same basic plot used in Arnold Schwarzenegger's COLLATERAL DAMAGE ('02)...they killed her, she was everything to me, this time it's personal, etc.

And sure enough, director F. Gary Gray makes the same mistake in depicting Diesel's married life that DAMAGE helmer Andrew Davis did with Arnold's blessed union before tragedy struck. He shows Vin and his relentlessly good-natured wife (Jaqueline Obradors) as being way too tickled with each other. We all know the equation: a deliriously happy couple cooking eggs and bacon in their dream home on a sunny Saturday morning means death is just around the corner. We all know it, that is, except for guys like F. Gary Gray. Why not show them being vaguely bored with each other, or maybe fighting about money? Naah...can't.

On top of which they live in a beach house that Diesel himself could afford, but not the character he plays. I mean, unless he's on the take.

Diesel had better watch his ass. One or two more shit sandwiches like this and his fans will bolt. The crowd I saw A MAN APART with a couple of days ago seemed to be with him, but then they were mostly New Line employees. Their reactions were almost astonishing, in a way. Here was this total turd playing on-screen (and they knew what it was -- you could feel the resignation in the room) and yet they'd laugh loudly and with spirit when something even a little bit funny happened. They were nothing but patience and kindnesses. The audience of the Good Samaritan.

This seemed to me one of the ugliest films I've seen in a long time. Jack Green's cinematography looks putrid all the way through. Your brain is trying to follow the stupid-ass plot and your eyes are telling you, "We don't want to watch this thing...it's bothering us. Can we go, please?" And you have to say to them, "All right, I know, I know...but I have to watch this thing, guys. I can't walk out after fifteen minutes. C'mon...work with me. Grim up and tough it out."

Good Dogs

The photography and editing in A MAN APART isn't fit to wipe the boots of the shooting and cutting in Sam Peckinpah's STRAW DOGS ('71). These two components are beautiful -- you can watch them over and over again solely for their own values. Hats off to dp John Coquillon and editors Paul Davies, Tony Lawson and Roger Spottiswoode. They all took their cues from Peckinpah, of course, but they deserve a hand of their own.

The cutting is especially masterful, particularly in the third act when the siege of the farmhouse sequence kicks in. There's just something about the rhythm of it all that keeps you riveted from start to finish.

And while I'm probably one of the last guys on the planet to heap praise upon the new DOGS DVD that Criterion has issued (which is beautifully transferred, by the way -- I've seen it six or seven times over the years, and it's never looked so colorful, sharp or clean), it's certainly bears repeating that this is a mesmerizing classic.

The commentary track by Steven Prince, author of "Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultra-Violent Movies," starts with this statement: "STRAW DOGS is Sam Peckinpah's masterpiece, and one of the most audacious and brilliantly accomplished films of the modern period. It's a film that has been attached and condemned, and is now neglected by most film critics and historians. I will try to explain why, with all its perversity and darkness, this is a great film."

The neglect and condemnation Prince speaks of is because of the film's uncool, flagrantly un-p.c. rape scene that happens in Act Two.

If you run in liberal writing circles, as all film critics and essayists naturally do, giving any kind of enthusiastic thumbs-up to STRAW DOGS right after the film's release (which happened just as feminism was starting to gather its forces and ring the gongs) was not wise. Saying "yes" to this disturbing film might have been interpreted, after all, as an oblique approval of Peckinpah's sexist views about women, which were seemingly dramatized by the fact that the rape victim -- Amy (Susan George), the wife of a wimpy mathematician named David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) -- half enjoys the first rape that occurs when two working-class louts slip into her home while her husband is out pheasant-hunting. (There's no ambiguity about her reaction to the second assault, which is pure agony.) And few film writers wanted to risk this.

The dirty little secret among many male film critics I've discussed this film with over the years is that they find the rape scene disturbing by virtue of the fact that it's a little bit...I almost wimped out but I have to say it. They find it slightly arousing, albeit in a highly conflicted way. You're not supposed to cop to this, but any guy who says they don't know what I'm talking about is just lying.

It's safer now, 32 years later, to say STRAW DOGS is a great film and not get hammered, and that's what's going on with the release of this DVD, essentially. It's a thick, highly persuasive, double-disc "position paper," in a sense, that's saying to the elite film-connoisseur community, "Okay...time to take another look and acknowledge the brilliance of this thing without all the mucky-muck."

Prince tries to make the case that Hoffman's character is the film's main "heavy" -- a coward, a trouble-starter, and in a repressed way the most violent character in the film. Some of this may be true, or all of it. But I've seen STRAW DOGS a couple of times with a revved-up audience, and there's no question that to them the bad guys were the rapists and their boozing workmen friends.

Once the heavy stuff starts -- once Sumner decides to protect the town idiot (David Warner) from these guys and the local constable, trying to send them away, is accidentally killed -- STRAW DOGS becomes one of the most gripping and weirdly exciting films ever made. It's a perverse masterwork, and you just have to get this DVD and do the whole thing -- see the flick, watch the documentaries, read the articles and so on. It's a trip-and-a-half.

Ripley Again

"Malkovich is very good (but not great) in RIPLEY'S GAME. Yet his performance is really the only interesting thing in the film, which, despite the gorgeous Italian setting, has a dingy, made-for-TV feel.

"For Highsmith lovers, there are other problems with this adaptation, too -- namely, that Cavani's Ripley bears almost no relationship with the Ripley of the books. The change in location explains part of it. In the book (which is set in the 1970s, by the way -- not the 1950s), Ripley lives a very nice and exceedingly bourgeois life in a small French town 12 miles from Fontainebleau. Over the course of time he has reinvented himself from a vulgar struggling American into a proper French bourgeois; in Cavani's movie, though, he lives in grand style in present-day Italy.

"This shift from upper middle-class comfort to almost princely extravagance turns Ripley into a kind of decadent aristocrat (and a very goatish one, too --this guy is much more highly sexualized, and coded in more heterosexual way,than Highsmith's character). That's fine; I have no problem with filmmakers going astray with source material. Cavani's changes certainly suit Malkovich's reptilian vibe but, unfortunately, they also gut what makes Highsmith's Ripley so interesting.

"The Ripley of the books is an unbelievably boring guy. He worries about his garden, about his food, his housekeeper, his brainless pretty wife; he dabbles as a Sunday painter and studies languages and literature, and he's always trying to 'improve' himself. But underneath that placid exterior lies a chilling, purely amoral killer: Ripley is a true sociopath who has no sense of morality, no sense of guilt and absolutely no sense of remorse. He lives an exceedingly pleasant upper middle-class life that has been paid for by the deaths of others (like the Jude Law character in Anthony Minghella's more faithful adaptation).