French cool
By Michael J. Roberts
“I am not a star - 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.” ~ Alain Delon
Alain Delon, born in 1935 in a Paris suburb, was to become an international film star and French Cinema icon, but his path there was full of bumps, detours and a certain Gallic sangfroid. An unruly student, his divorced parents gave permission for him to see military service in the French Navy in the early 1950s and he did a tour of duty in Indochina and saw action in the battle of Dien Bien Phu before getting into more trouble and being expelled. Upon his return to France he fell in to the lower depths and found support and comfort around prostitutes and pimps before his stunning good looks marked him for a career on the screen.
Delon set off for a stint in Rome, then much in fashion for international co-productions, and was offered a Hollywood contract by Selznick Studios, on the condition he learned to speak English. He returned to France and in true French fashion was offered a small part in a film by his then lover’s husband, Yves Allégret called Send A Woman When The Devil Fails. Allégret’s brother Marc, also a veteran director, sensed the raw actor had plenty to offer and gave Delon his next part in a comedy called Be Beautiful, But Shut Up. A significant break came his way via a major film star, Romy Schneider in Christine, and the pair became long term lovers into the bargain.
Delon’s career took off in 1960 after established director René Clément cast him as Tom Ripley in Purple Noon, a lively adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Delon enjoyed his first great hit. He consolidated his position with a huge success in Italian master Luchino Visconti’s Rocco And His Brothers and was a first rank star from then on. Clément again used the in demand actor for a comedy called The Joy of Living, and he showed his versatility again in Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterful L’Eclisse, opposite French legend Jeanne Moreau. Delon next made a film with one of his idols, Jean Gabin, in Any Number Can Win, a popular heist film and then worked for Visconti again in the seminal The Leopard, with Claudia Cardinale and Burt Lancaster. Another Clément project was a hit, Joy House opposite Jane Fonda, before he played to the gallery in a light swashbuckler called The Black Tulip, which was big European hit.
The paradox of Delon was evident by then, in that here was a major French star at the height of the Nouvelle Vague who had almost nothing to do with the ‘movement’ during its golden period. He worked with older French directors or Italian directors, but not with Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Varda or any of a number of the signal French directors of the time. Delon was probably seen as a movie star more in tune with the stature of a Gabin than with his contemporary and great rival Jean Paul Belmondo. Delon had set his ambitions wider and aimed for success in America and had signed a multi-picture deal with MGM, but it led to tepid results. One of the more interesting projects was his excellent and overlooked noir, the downbeat L'Insoumis, directed by Alain Cavalier and opposite Italian actress Lea Massari, who’d worked with Antonioni on L’Avventura. Ironically, the film very much fit the Nouvelle Vague moment even if it wasn’t a hit at the box office. He worked with Anthony Asquith on The Yellow Rolls Royce and in Once A Thief, opposite Ann-Margret. He bounced from a war film with Anthony Quinn to a western for Universal opposite Dean Martin, but nothing stuck. René Clément came to the rescue again with a much more appropriate role in the hit film Is Paris Burning?
Delon stayed in France to make the excellent The Last Adventure, opposite old pal Lino Ventura and then appeared in his most iconic role for maverick auteur Jean-Pierre Melville as the brooding assassin Jef Costello in le Samouraï. It would be one of his signature roles and most assured performances. Another iconoclast, Julien Duvivier, used him opposite Senta Burger in the lifeless thriller Diabolically Yours, where Duvivier never quite achieved the level of Chabrol/Clouzot artistry the film needed.
Alain Delon was now one of the great international stars in an era when co-productions between countries were common. He certainly realised that the best course of action was to use his clout to either produce films himself or to star with A-list directors on the other side of the camera. He also knew that marketing was a big part of the game and made an English language film, Girl on A Motorcycle, directed by Jack Cardiff and starring against *Mick Jagger’s ‘it’ girl of the time, Marianne Faithfull. The film was a mess but the box office was solid. He then made the excellent La Piscine, starring opposite the love of his life Romy Schneider in the first of what would be eight features for director Jacques Deray across a couple of decades.
* Delon was no stranger to the ‘lower depths’ and was notoriously associated with Corsican gangsters and other seedy types and when the Stones were recording in the south of France during their tax exile period in the early 1970s, some local criminals were supplying the heroin to Keith and Gram Parsons. When Stones sax player Bobby Keyes started an affair with one of Delon’s girlfriends, it is said Delon wanted Keyes punished. Even the decadent Stones had sense to quickly decamp to Los Angeles to finish what would become their hothouse masterpiece, Exile On Main Street.
As if to underline his reputation Delon starred as a gangster (with ageing French icon Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura) in The Sicilian Clan, a huge box office hit. Delon entered the 1970s on a high and continued the them with a marketing dream team of Jean Paul Belmondo and Delon in Borsalino, a Depression era gangster flick directed by Deray that was an enormous hit in France and around the world. Delon’s next significant film was a reunion with Melville, le Cercle Rouge, a crime thriller that had both men at the top of their game. A quirky, if confused spaghetti western followed, Red Sun, directed by Brit Terence Young and co-starring Toshiro Mifune, Charles Bronson and Ursula Andress!
Delon was in a UK/French/Italian venture for Joseph Losey, The Assassination of Trotsky – a film that divided audiences. It was another reunion with Romy Schneider and he got to act opposite Richard Burton who played the title character and Delon’s performance gathered much praise if critical adulation for the film itself was scant. Melville teamed Delon up with the gorgeous Catherine Deneuve in Un Flic, another crime film that did well and was the last of Melville’s films as he died relatively young the next year at the age of 55. Michael Winner provided a spy thriller opposite Burt Lancaster in the middling Scorpio and Jose Giovanni directed Delon and Jean Gabin in Two Men in Town, a fine moral drama where the pair are trying to keep Delon from being executed for murder, both actors are very fine in their respective roles.
Delon rolled through the decade doing a couple more crime thrillers with Jacques Deray, Borsalino and Co. and Flic Story, broken up by a swashbuckler version of Zorro, before as a producer he tapped Joseph Losey to direct what would be one of his finest performances as the anguished art dealer during the Nazi Occupation, Monsieur Klein. Delon completed the 70s on autopilot but the 1980s started promisingly with a fine Deray crime film, Three Men To Kill. Knowing his audience and his image he directed his first film (and was star and producer) in To Kill a Cop, a significant success in France. A second directorial effort in similar territory two years later, Le Battant, was lesser in every regard.
Again playing to type, Delon cuddled up to Catherine Deneuve as an aging hitman trying to quit in the excellent le Choc. He won a Best Actor César finally for Our Story, and absurdist romance directed by Bertrand Blier in 1984 (The César being the French Academy Awards instituted by his friend Gabin in 1974). A prestige international production of Proust’s Swann In Love followed – Directed by Volker Schlöndorff, co-written by Peter Brook - Jeremy Irons starred with Delon and Fanny Ardant and it was shot by Sven Nykvist. The only other variation on the ubiquitous crime thriller for the rest of the decade was a turn for iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard in the bizarre and experimental Nouvelle Vague, where Godard blew up his own cinematic legacy. The 1990s didn’t offer much to Delon apart from a couple of Deray crime flicks (Déjà vu all over again) but pretty much ended his mainstream film career with a very clever Patrice Leconte conceit, Half a Chance, where a young woman goes in search of her real father, narrowing it down to Delon and Jean Paul Belmondo!
Alain Delon lived a long, rich and interesting life and it ended in August 2024 at the age of 88. Like Robert Redford or Brad Pitt he was condemned by his good looks to be forever underestimated as an actor, and yet he left a rich and eternal legacy in cinema. Delon’s personal life was a mess, his associations questionable and his longevity formidable, but on screen he was luminous and that light will never dim. He seemed to exist both within and outside of French cinema, as he possibly did also in French society, a paradox to the end.
Viva et Vale Delon.