Of course he was gorgeous — it was always the first thing you noticed about Alain Delon whenever he appeared onscreen, that otherworldly handsomeness that took your breath away no matter where you fell on the Kinsey scale. The French movie star knew that he was one of the most beautiful people to ever grace the movies, from any country and in any era, with those near-geometric cheekbones and those icy blue eyes; Delon knew his looks opened professional doors for him and opened the arms of women whose company he was happy to keep. He knew, but he couldn’t be bothered to care. “The Male Brigitte Bardot,” as he was once dubbed, didn’t seem to care about much of anything. And it was the combo of those two things — that handsomeness and that haughtiness — that turned him into an international superstar.
The persona that Delon, who died over the weekend at the age of 88, projected in his films — stoic, distant, simply above it all — wasn’t completely an act. He could be mercurial in real life, and certainly gave interviewers the feeling that he’d rather be anywhere but where he happened to be. But Delon had affection for a lot of things, including a legacy he spent his autumn years demeaning or dismissing. There’s a video of him accepting an honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019 that’s on YouTube, where you can see him beaming with pride during his daughter’s introduction, weeping onstage and noting that he’s always put everything into his career, which is why the award meant so much to him. The fact that people focused on his Greek-god mug didn’t bug him. He just felt contemptuous of those who couldn’t see past it. “I am not a star,” he told a British film magazine in the mid-1960s. “I am an actor. I have been fighting for ten years to make people forget that I am just a pretty boy with a beautiful face. It’s a hard fight, but I will win it.”
Delon did win it. We wouldn’t still be talking about him decades later if he hadn’t. Sure, the young miscreant who joined the French marines and spent time in a military prison — for, among numerous other infractions, stealing a jeep and driving it into a river — initially attracted attention from the film industry because of his attractiveness. Yet he eventually proved that he’d earned the right to be called both an actor and a star. His oft-repeated origin story of tagging along with an acquaintance to Cannes in 1957 on a whim and immediately having to choose between a potential Hollywood screen test and getting scouted by French filmmaker Yves Allégret for a part in his drama Send a Woman When the Devil Fails. Delon turned down both offers. When Allégret told him he had convinced the producers to cast him despite Delon saying “No,” the young man politely reconsidered. “Honestly, I only did it to make him happy,” the star later told a French TV interviewer.
He’d show up in a number of French productions over the next few years until he happened to land a one-two punch in 1960. The first hit was Purple Noon, in which Delon played the original screen incarnation of Patricia Highsmith’s antihero Tom Ripley. Unlike future versions that would run the gamut from boyish and conflicted (The Talented Mr. Ripley) to chessmaster-level calculating (Netflix’s Ripley), Delon’s class-conscious con man is more of a cypher. He’s also a master at weaponizing his off-the-charts sex appeal, which makes this take on Tom that much more edgy and dangerous. It was on this film that director René Clément, who Delon referred to as his “professor,” taught the actor that an entire performance could be crafted primarily with one’s eyes. Delon dubbed it “the Look,” and his embrace of this methodology not only turned his Ripley into the most silent and observant of sociopathic predators, but informed the rest of his career. Show, don’t tell. And say as much with what little you do show as possible.
The second K.O. was Rocco and His Brothers, in which Delon is the most sensitive and nurturing of an Italian brood’s siblings, and comes to pay the price for being his brothers’ keeper. It paired him for the first time with Luchino Visconti, who knew that he had not just a wonderfully photogenic performer on his hands but a world-class talent to boot. Asked why he cast Alain in the lead role, the filmmaker replied that he immediately recognized that the separation between the character battling through hard times and Delon’s own backstory was incredibly thin. He was Rocco, Visconti exclaimed: “I couldn’t have made this without him in it.”
From there, Delon’s name began getting prime real estate above the title, doing everything from heist flicks to swashbuckler adventures, all of which took advantage of his jawline and his pout. Hollywood beckoned, he answered the call and found that it had little to nothing to offer him, and vice versa. But it was a series of brooding lost souls — all different, all moody, all easy on the eyes — that would make him the angelic face of contemporary Euro-angst. He lent a world-weary ennui to Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962), and re-teamed with Visconti for The Leopard (1963), an elegiac period epic with a strong claim to being one of the greatest films ever made. (Don’t just take our word for it.)
And the vastly underrated L’insoumis (1964) finds his character deserting his post in the Foreign Legion and joining a far-right militia that kidnaps a lawyer defending Algerian rebels; it played in America as The Unvanquished, but it’s showed on TCM with the deliciously B-movie title Have I the Right to Kill? (This was also the movie that also gave us the still of Delon, prone on the floor, that graced the cover of The Smiths‘ 1986 masterpiece The Queen Is Dead.) Existential antiheroes suited his strengths as an actor marvelously. No offense to Marcello Mastroianni, but the fact that Visconti didn’t cast Delon as the lead role in his 1967 adaptation of The Stranger truly feels like a missed opportunity.
Two of these types of roles in particular from this period stand out, and both ended up introducing him to two separate generations of fans. Le Samourai feels like the role Delon was always meant to play — there may have been professional hit men who take a Zen-like approach to their work before (notably 1958’s Murder by Contract), but his tamped down, action-is-character style of acting is exactly what director Jean-Pierre Melville’s dapper assassin needs. There’s no dialogue for the first 10 minutes or so, and yet watching Delon’s killer wordlessly go about his business as he prepares for a job tells you everything you need to know about this man and the world he moves in. It became a huge influence on a number of filmmakers from John Woo to David Fincher, and as more and more directors namechecked this coldblooded crime-thriller landmark in the 1990s, Delon suddenly became a hipster-cool icon again. His utilization of “the Look” was never put to better use.
The other film was a recent rediscovery rescued from obscurity courtesy of a well-timed restoration and an ill-timed pandemic. La Piscine (1969) would hit repertory theaters right around the time that people were beginning to slowly venture back to the movies post-Covid, and the idea of watching the gorgeous screen Europeans of yesteryear indulge in sex, murder, sunbathing and more sex in Saint Tropez felt like a much-needed tonic. It became a huge hit on the revival scene and a popular streaming title on the Criterion Channel, in no small part because of Delon. There was plenty of beauty to go around, considering his costars were his former squeeze Romy Schneider and Jane Birkin, but once again, Delon is the alpha eye-candy here. This vintage prime cut of primal-urge trash turned the star into an objet d’thirst for the social-media set, who responded to Delon’s dispassionate, aloof persona and bronzed Adonis physique the same way Sixties’ audiences did. Over 50 years later, he was still the hottest iceberg on the block.
We like our past movie stars to be complex onscreen and blank slates sans baggage offscreen, and it’s easier now to revel in Delon’s work now than it was when he was embroiled in controversies, alleged instances of problematic-even-then behavior and a real-life murder scandal. (Do yourself a favor and check out this Dick Cavett interview with Delon from 1970, in which the host tries to ask him about the latter. You can see, in real time, the exact moment Alain’s fuse runs out.) Many folks will head straight to Le Samourai or La Piscine to once again bask in Delon in his prime, as well they should. But we’d suggest chasing those pleasures with something a little more complicated. Mr. Klein (1978) was a project that Delon chased, and added “producer” to his resume. Following a Catholic art dealer who’s mistaken for a Jewish man with his same name during France’s occupation in WWII — and is thus beholden to the same mortal danger that his fellow Klein would be during this dark period of history — it ended up becoming a huge critical hit and won a slew of awards in France. Delon is still using “the Look” to hit the story’s marks, but there’s a depth to the stillness here that is anything but I’m-so-over-it coolness. Watch this, and you remember that yes, he was still a Grade-A international movie star. But the self-proclaimed boy with the pretty face was AWOL. What you see is an artist.
From Rolling Stone US
