In Memoriam: Alain Delon

Last year, at the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, I saw a newly restored version of "Tony Arzenta" (called "No Way Out" in the U.S.), a 1973 Italian thriller from director Duccio Tessari, although even in that sophisticated audience few had heard of or cared about the director. We were there, several hundred of us, to see Alain Delon. 

Delon plays the title role, a mob hitman looking to retire. The mob always disapproves of retirement, and the story swiftly becomes a chronicle of tit-for-tat revenge. Everything about this film screams 1970s, from the loud shirts and flappy lapels to the frequently topless women (and the beatings meted out to them by the bad guys). The movie gives a complete tour of the way Delon played gangsters in this era—grief lurking in his eyes along with icy fury, able to escape traps with feline grace, though we sense doom around every corner. 

As I walked out, I ran into a renowned critic, who stated, with the utmost cheerfulness, “Well. That was terrible.” 

And my friend was not wrong—there was little to distinguish the filmmaking. Yet I enjoyed the movie, which is another way of saying I enjoyed Delon. For a good long chunk of his career, roles like Tony Arzenta were Delon’s bread and butter. And international audiences kept going back for more. Because even with a dull script, Alain Delon—who died this past weekend, age 88—was a peerless movie star. Given a good part, and he had them many times, he was an exceptional actor as well. 

Delon had a rough start and an even rougher adolescence, as he was repeatedly bounced out of schools for bad behavior and low grades; “he was typically 43rd out of 44,” according to his mother. He tried to find a niche, faring poorly as an assistant to his stepfather’s butcher business and doing even worse as a French marine in Indochina. Delon saw combat, but he also saw the brig after stealing a jeep. It’s lucky for all of us that after he was discharged, Delon was eventually spotted in Cannes (how could they miss him) and offered a chance in movies. 

He had no training; he learned on the job. Delon began with a part in Yves Allégret’s over-titled 1957 “Send a Woman When the Devil Fails,” and he reminisced much later about what Allégret told him about acting: “Speak as you are speaking to me. Stare as you are staring at me. Listen as you are listening to me. Don’t act. Live.’” Added Delon, “It changed everything.” 

Indeed, we can see how Delon used that advice in his first major role, as the remorseless Tom Ripley in Rene Clement’s "Purple Noon" (1960). There’s a famous scene where Ripley tells his erstwhile friend Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet) how he plans to steal his money and identity, which would naturally involve killing Philippe first. That’s chilling enough, but the moment takes on added impact from the fact that we have spent some considerable runtime watching Ripley think about it, seeing him decide that Philippe doesn’t deserve the money or the girl. Later, you can watch Ripley’s fleeting glance at his hotel room, and know instantly, before he moves, that he’s looking for a blunt instrument with which to bash in the head of the intrusive Freddy Miles (Billy Kearns). 

That same year, in a brilliant bookend, Delon played Rocco Parondi in "Rocco and His Brothers," Luchino Visconti’s saga of a rural Italian family moving to Milan for the sake of a better future, only to find brutality, heartbreak, and alienation. "Rocco" contains such violence and operatic levels of emotion that Francis Ford Coppola cited it as an influence on "The Godfather," but there are no real gangsters in Visconti’s film. Instead, the part of Rocco—”saint-like,” Delon called him—revealed something gentle and humane in Delon, such as the exquisite scene where Rocco meets up on a streetcar with the woman he loves and shyly edges close to her, at one point inclining his head as if to breathe her in. 

These are functions of the plot, yes, but the reason we believe them is that Delon, at the moment, believes them. “The camera’s a mind reader,” John Barrymore said. Let’s add that the camera is ruthless, and it will always reveal what the actor is giving it. Delon gave the camera focused, concentrated imagination—a mind engrossed in being, not just displaying. And Delon had more range than he is credited for. The audience might see close to everything in his character, as with the self-love and manipulative charm of the ambitious Tancredi in "The Leopard" (1963). Or you might find a void, a lack of affect that goes beyond even Tom Ripley’s sociopathy into true nothingness, as with Jef in "Le Samourai" (1967). Delon reminds me, more than anyone else, of Greta Garbo, who also was called upon to redeem some subpar material on occasion. Both could project all manner of emotions in the course of a single closeup. Not merely charm; Garbo and Delon could bring that, but it wasn’t their primary weapon. They didn’t need charm because they could fascinate, exerting an almost hypnotic pull.

There was something unapologetically old-school about Delon. His idols were actors like Jean Gabin, whom he called “boss” (and who in turn called Delon “kid”). He admired Montgomery Clift, who “never moved a muscle unnecessarily,” a technique Delon obviously took as his own. And he considered John Garfield the summit: “He did 10 years before what everybody did after.” Delon arrived around the same time as the French New Wave, but worked in a slightly different key, via roles with “father of the New Wave” Jean-Pierre Melville ("Le Samourai," "Le Cercle Rouge") and with breakthrough figures in other countries, like Michelangelo Antonioni and "L’Eclisse" in 1962. It would take him until 1990 to take on a film with Jean-Luc Godard, "Nouvelle Vague." Godard told Delon, “You only made three good films,” adding by way of comfort, “but you made them, you and no one else.” (No, I don’t know which films, I wish I did.) 

Alongside those career peaks are surprises, such as Delon’s sympathetic role in "Two Men in Town" (1973) as a bank robber paroled after a 10-year stretch. Delon’s character wants to go straight with the help of a social worker, played by Jean Gabin. But the cop who arrested him (Michel Bouquet, uncommonly malevolent) harasses him at every turn, and in the last act "Two Men in Town" becomes an indictment of the death penalty. Written and directed by the gifted but deeply unsavory Jose Giovanni, it’s still one of the roles that went against Delon’s own hard-right inclinations—Delon said more than once that he was in favor of capital punishment. 

But then any attempt to grapple with Delon, the varied and unfettered artist, will eventually bump into his tumultuous existence off-camera, the things he said along the way, and whether he played by his own rules or even agreed that there were rules. He was a longtime friend of the far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen and made statements such as, “He thinks first of the interests of France.” (Thankfully, Delon made no public response when Le Pen suggested the actor was ideal casting to play him in a biopic.) In the 2000s, Delon denounced the idea of gay marriage—seemingly without a single glance back at the famed 1969 BBC interview where he all but acknowledged affairs with men. 

There’s more where that came from, but perhaps the murkiest chapter in a life full of them was the 1968 killing of Delon’s bodyguard Stefan Marcovic, whose corpse was found outside of Paris, beaten, shot in the head, wrapped in a mattress cover and dumped in a garbage heap. Delon spoke willingly to the police and was eventually cleared, but the murder was never solved. Did Delon take this sordid, frightening episode as a message to cool it with his well-known underworld associates? He did not. A scandal as wild as this one, which grew to encompass the Corsican mafia and rumored orgies, could have ended another actor’s career, even in the 1960s. Delon, who was filming "La Piscine" with his ex-love Romy Schneider, scarcely skipped a beat. Jacques Deray’s movie, in which Delon once again got to murder Maurice Ronet, did just fine in France, and its air of sun-kissed decadence remains so potent that it was a huge hit at New York’s Film Forum in 2021. 

L’affaire Markovic was still making news in 1970 when Delon was asked by the New York Times whether he was bothered by what some of his friends did for a living. Delon replied, “I don't worry about what a friend does. Each one is responsible for his own act.” With this Sinatra-esque attitude (he’d admired Frank Sinatra from boyhood on), Delon forged ahead with multiple movies that leaned into his reputation. I especially like Deray’s "Borsalino," the story of two Marseille crooks (the other played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) in the 1930s who rise from minor rackets to major racketeering; and "The Sicilian Clan," a French-Italian gangster film directed by Henri Verneuil. An early scene finds Delon’s criminal escaping from a police transport by cutting through the bottom of the truck with a smuggled tool, then lowering himself underneath. Delon didn’t play concentrated, sweaty fear all that often, but he does here, making the sequence incredibly tense. 

In 1976 Delon produced and acted in "Mr. Klein," a psychological drama of Occupied Paris, directed by the formerly blacklisted Joseph Losey. It’s a layered, haunting, and exceptional movie about Robert Klein (Delon), a French Catholic art dealer making a fortune by paying rock-bottom rates for paintings sold by desperate Jews. Abruptly, he becomes aware that he may have been mistaken for a different Robert Klein, who is Jewish. Thus does one Mr. Klein descend into an obsessive search for the other. Delon loved this role of a man who at first feels well-protected but comes to sense and dread a far less privileged version of himself. But while the film "Mr. Klein" won awards, Delon’s superb performance did not. The left-wing political filmmaker Costa-Gavras said he fought hard for Delon on the Cannes jury that year, but like many others who admire the art, Costa-Gavras was up against Delon’s seeming inability to stop making noxious public remarks. In fact, it wasn’t long after "Mr. Klein" that Delon proclaimed “I am profoundly anti-communist”—which, ok—then added, as if lack of controversy might hurt the image, that if this made him a fascist, too bad. 

If I have neglected most of Alain Delon’s personal life, it’s because it’s more exhausting than his politics and even less appealing. And perhaps by now, it’s become apparent that I’m not mentioning something else: the beauty. That once-in-a-lifetime face. Attractiveness matters at the movies, however much we may try to deny or write around that fact. But your mother was right; looks aren’t everything, not even for an actor. Delon, of course, understood that, and approached his own beauty with a strong dose of French bluntness, as when a 1990 interviewer asked for the umpteenth time whether it was a chore being gorgeous. The answer, roughly translated: “Physical beauty is a problem when you're handsome and a moron. Or handsome and a bad actor. I dare say I don’t put myself in those categories. So beauty can be a problem. But it’s somebody else’s problem, someone who’s jealous or spiteful…Let’s be clear, physical beauty, for a man or a woman, when you have the rest, is a big advantage. You have to recognize it.” 

Looking at Alain Delon is one of the keenest pleasures in cinema. But If handsome was all that mattered, Buster Crabbe would have been a superstar. Delon had the advantage, but in his acting, he had the rest, too.