The Icy Beauty of Alain Delon

Manohla Dargis, too, wrote about the series in the New York Times, noting that Delon’s “looks over the years have been described as sensual though also insolent, cruel, self-absorbed, and androgynous, a word that helps explain why his beauty—as with that of other men whose looks threaten tidy gender norms—makes some viewers uneasy even as it sends others into ecstasy.”

When Delon passed away on Sunday at the age of eighty-eight, several writers struggled to pin down what it was about him that both attracted and unnerved us. “Delon had a mesmerically demure, long-lashed, almost feline look that could indicate something mysterious, or wounded, or malign,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. Frequent Current contributor Sheila O’Malley suggests that Delon’s “was not an inviting kind of beauty . . . Delon did not always play chilly sociopaths, but smart directors understood this forbidding quality was his ace in the hole. There was something criminal about it. His beauty was indistinguishable from amorality. The beauty was not illuminated by the inner spirit and soul.”

Before he became a star in his midtwenties, Delon lived through some pretty rough-and-tumble years. His parents, a projectionist and a movie-theater usher, lived in a well-to-do suburb of Paris, but they divorced when he was four. He never got over it. When a French television host asked him in 1996 what he hoped to hear God say when he died, Delon barely hesitated: “Since this is your greatest and deepest regret, I know, come, I’ll take you to your father and mother, so that for the first time, at last, you can see them together.”

As a boy, Delon was shuffled between a foster home and his father’s and mother’s new families. He picked fights and got tossed out of school. He joined the navy and served in what was then French Indochina, where he “borrowed” and then ditched a jeep, leading to a dishonorable discharge.

Back in Paris, he knocked around Pigalle, the raucous neighborhood so beloved by Delon’s future collaborator Jean-Pierre Melville. He lived for a while with actress Brigitte Auber and tagged along when she went to Cannes in 1957. There, he was spotted by Henry Willson, a talent agent who represented Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter. Willson referred Delon to David O. Selznick, who invited him to Rome and offered him a seven-year contract with one condition—Delon would have to improve his English.

Before that happened, his new lover, Michèle Cordoue, convinced her husband, director Yves Allégret, to cast him in a small role in Send a Woman When the Devil Fails (1957). Years later, according to the Hollywood Reporter’s Jordan Mintzer, Delon recalled that Allégret “took one look at me and said: ‘Listen to me very carefully, Alain: Talk like you talk to me. Look like you look at me. Listen like you listen to me. Don’t act, live.’ That changed everything.”

The breakthrough came when René Clément cast him as Tom Ripley in Purple Noon (1960), an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. “At this point in his career,” wrote Michael Koresky for Film Comment in 2018, Delon “didn’t look or move like other French male stars with their burly, recessive Jean Gabin cool; he was tactile—lithe and slim, he gracefully slid across the screen with the confidence of a jackal. It’s conjecture to say that he loved being looked at, but in Purple Noon there’s something in that devious smile, and the way those crystal-blue eyes and delicately arched eyebrows are caught in high-angle close-up, that makes it unavoidable to assume so: he seemed preternaturally aware of the gaze of the camera and its ability to grant him superpowers.”

Later that same year, Luchino Visconti directed Delon in Rocco and His Brothers, a story told in five chapters, one for each brother in an Italian family, the Parondis, struggling to work their way out of poverty. As Rocco, Delon “has the face of one of Caravaggio’s dark angels,” wrote Scott Eyman for Film Comment in 2015, adding that Rocco “ascends to the torrential emotions of Verdi and Victor Hugo, as the Parondis collapse into interlocking antagonisms.”

In Visconti’s The Leopard (1963), Delon played the aristocrat Tancredi, who fights alongside revolutionaries during Italy’s long midnineteenth-century struggle to become a united and independent nation. Writing in the Village Voice in 2018, Bilge Ebiri savored the “indelible moment” when Claudia Cardinale enters a room—and the movie. When she “captures Delon’s eye, we see, expressed with the full force of cinematic style and star power, the promise of an onscreen couple presented as if it were the realization of a historical process: These are two of the most beautiful humans on Earth, and it’s inevitable that they will find each other in this room. Delon will meet Cardinale. The nobleman will meet the middle-class girl. Wealth will preserve itself. The Italian idea will survive.”

Between the two Viscontis, Delon brought a rambunctious liveliness one hardly expects in a Michelangelo Antonioni movie to L’eclisse (1962). He’s a stock broker who falls for a translator (Monica Vitti), and “although Antonioni is rarely viewed as a director of actors,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum ten years ago, “I would argue that L’eclisse features the most expressive and exuberant performances by Vitti and Delon in any movie, and that the achievements of this highly structured masterpiece would be unthinkable without them.”

Jean Gabin had long been one of Delon’s idols, and in 1963, he talked producer Jacques Bar into getting himself cast alongside Gabin in the heist movie Any Number Can Win (1963). Directed by Henri Verneuil, it’s one of ten films starring Delon that Elisabeth Vincentelli recommends in the New York Times. “It’s a lot of fun to watch him play a lovable bad boy in a leather jacket, and at times he even gives out Gallic Steve McQueen vibes,” she writes. Verneuil, Gabin, and Delon reunited for The Sicilian Clan (1969), costarring Lino Ventura. Anouchka Delon tells Air Mail that it’s her favorite of her father’s movies: “I must confess, I have seen it at least 350 times.”

A brief stint in Hollywood in the mid-1960s didn’t do much for Delon, though he did get to appear alongside Shirley MacLaine in the anthology film The Yellow Rolls-Royce and costar with Ann-Margret in Once a Thief, both released in 1965. When he returned to France, Melville came to his house with a screenplay. “You’ve been reading your script for seven minutes,” Delon interrupted, “and there’s still not a shred of dialogue. That’s enough for me. I’m making this movie. What’s it called?”

Le samouraï (1967). Melville himself once described it as an “analysis of a schizophrenic sketched by a paranoid.” Cinematographer Henri Decaë, who shot Purple Noon, worked with Melville and Delon on both Le samouraï and Le cercle rouge (1970), helping the director “achieve his dream of creating a black-and-white film in color,” as Imogen Sara Smith wrote a few years ago. “In some scenes from Le samouraï the colors are so bloodless they seem to have been drained by a vampire; they match Alain Delon’s chillingly soulless performance as a professional hit man. The meticulous, robotic Jef Costello could hardly be more different from the opportunistic charmer Ripley. Here Delon’s pale skin looks icy to the touch, and his irresistible smile is never glimpsed.”

Delon’s Jean-Paul in Jacques Deray’s La piscine (1969) brought him several sunlit shades closer to Ripley. In Purple Noon, Tom knifes his wealthy friend (Maurice Ronet) “and pitches his body over the edge of a trim sailboat into an implacably blue Mediterranean,” writes Jessica Kiang. “Then he eats a peach. Almost a decade later, in the first of his nine collaborations with Deray, Delon forces Ronet under the teal waters of the pool on the darkened grounds of a Saint-Tropez villa . . . Each time, Delon’s permafrost eyes conceal his character’s intentions until the victim’s last gasp, and if, in La piscine, Jean-Paul does not messily devour a peach to signal an animalistic lack of remorse after the fact, he does the next best thing: he goes to sleep.”

Another collaboration with Deray is a standout for Christina Newland. In Le gang (1977), “Delon and his crew are bank robbers operating right after the Second World War and seen mainly from the perspective of besotted girlfriend Marinette (Nicole Calfan)," writes Newland in the Notebook. “Yet the film’s bloodless larks and nostalgic tone are shot through with references to Vichy collaboration, the deportation of Jews, and anti-Algerian sentiment of police at the time; Delon’s populist genre fare never lacked wider insight. Le gang also distinguishes itself from Hollywood-like escapism with its bleak conclusion, leaving an anguished Marinette in freeze-frame over the closing credits. This may be among the closest any of Delon’s films came to commenting on the overwhelmingly patriarchal sexual politics of their milieu.”

Delon’s politics overall put off many. When Cannes announced that he was to receive an honorary Palme d’Or in 2019, a petition protesting his “racism, homophobia, and misogyny” gathered twenty-five thousand signatures. In the mid-1980s, he was known to be on friendly terms with Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was at the time the president of the far-right National Front and a convicted Holocaust denier. And yet Delon not only starred in but also produced such films as Le gang and Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein (1976), another indictment of Vichy France.

Paris, 1942. Delon’s Klein is an art dealer shamelessly paying way too little for the treasures his Jewish customers bring to him, looking to raise cash to fund their escape from the country. While Klein’s father assures him that the family has been French and Catholic “since Louis XIV,” authorities are getting him mixed up with another, Jewish Klein.

“Mr. Klein marks the high point in the second half of the star’s filmography,” writes Ginette Vincendeau. “While he went on making hugely popular thrillers and won critical acclaim for Notre histoire (Bertrand Blier) and Swann in Love (Volker Schlöndorff) in 1984, no film after Mr. Klein was able to deploy, explore, and challenge his star persona or inspire his acting in the same way. Rarely has there been such a perfect fit between character and star.”

Late career highlights are sparse, but any list would have to include Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle vague (1990). Delon stars as “two brothers who may be the same person,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, and the film “conjures a vision of an Old and New Testament that is also the story of the classic cinema and Godard’s own.” Sixteen years after Godard and Delon brought the film to Cannes, Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing in the Chicago Reader, called Nouvelle vague one of Godard’s “most challenging and difficult films, which helps to explain its scarcity, but it’s also hard to think of many films in Godard’s career that look as beautiful.”

But Vincendeau has a point, and Delon himself cited Mr. Klein as a personal favorite. Talking to Air Mail last year, Farran Smith Nehme suggested that one reason may be that “the movie shows off his underrated emotional range. Mr. Klein turns the clichéd relationship between Delon and his films—the icy star of the thriller—on its head. Losey’s direction remains chilly and enigmatic, even as the title character becomes ever more unhinged. Delon never gave a more disturbing performance.”

“Like the hitman in Le samouraï, Klein is self-contained and withdrawn,” observes Peter Bradshaw. “Almost a decade on from the Melville crime classic, Delon’s impassivity has achieved something refined and mandarin-like, but morally compromised. There is a genius to his performance when he effectively humiliates a Jewish customer by getting a cut-price picture and on the way out, this man points out the newsletter on his mat—like the ones he himself gets. Delon’s face flickers with fear, astonishment, distaste, panic, and a clear sense that to betray any emotion would be a defeat. In a way, this is his masterpiece.”