In Memoriam: Alain Delon | Tributes

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.), the 1973 Italian thriller by director Duccio Tessari, though even in that refined audience few had heard of or cared about the director. We were there, a few hundred of us, to see Alain Delon.

Delon plays the title role, a mafia hitman looking to retire. The mafia frowns on retirement, and the story quickly becomes a chronicle of tit-for-tat revenge. Everything about this film screams 1970s, from the gaudy shirts and flapping lapels to the often topless women (and the beatings they received at the hands of the bad guys). The film is a complete picture of how Delon played gangsters of this era: sadness lurks in his eyes alongside icy fury, able to escape traps with feline grace, even as we sense disaster around every corner.

As I walked out I bumped into a famous critic who said with the greatest glee, “Well. That was terrible.”

And my friend was right: there was little that distinguished the filmmaking. Still, I enjoyed the film, which is another way of saying I liked Delon. For much of his career, roles like Tony Arzenta were Delon’s bread and butter. And international audiences kept coming back for more. Because even with a dull script, Alain Delon, who died last weekend at 88, was a peerless movie star. When he got a good part, and he often did, he was also an exceptional actor.

Delon had a rough start and an even rougher adolescence, repeatedly expelled from school for bad behavior and low grades; “he was usually 43rd out of 44,” according to his mother. He tried to find a niche, doing poorly as an assistant in his stepfather’s butcher shop and even worse as a French marine in Indochina. Delon saw combat, but he also saw the brig after stealing a jeep. It’s fortunate for all of us that after his discharge, Delon was finally spotted in Cannes (how could they miss him) and given a shot in movies.

He had no formal training; he learned on the job. Delon got his start with a role in Yves Allégret’s overtitled “Send a Woman When the Devil Fails” in 1957, and he would muse much later about what Allégret had told him about acting: “Speak the way you talk to me. Stare the way you stare at me. Listen the way you listen to me. Don’t act. Live.” Delon added, “It changed everything.”

Indeed, we can see Delon using that advice in his first major role, as the ruthless Tom Ripley in René Clement’s “Purple Noon“ (1960). There’s a famous scene where Ripley tells his former friend Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet) how he plans to steal his money and identity, which of course would mean killing Philippe first. That’s chilling enough, but the moment is made all the more powerful by the fact that we’ve spent a good chunk of the running time watching Ripley ruminate on it, deciding that Philippe doesn’t deserve the money or the girl. Later, you see Ripley glance around his hotel room, and you know, before he moves, that he’s looking for a blunt instrument with which to bash in the head of the pushy 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 who move to Milan for a better future, only to find brutality, heartbreak and alienation. “Rocco” contains so much 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 role of Rocco — “saintly,” Delon called him — revealed something gentle and humane in Delon, as in the beautiful scene in which Rocco meets the woman he loves on a tram and shyly steps close to her, at one point bowing his head as if to inhale her.

These are functions of the plot, yes, but the reason we believe them is that Delon believes them in the moment. “The camera is a mind reader,” said John Barrymore. Let us add that the camera is relentless and will always reveal what the actor gives it. Delon gave the camera a focused, concentrated imagination — a mind absorbed in being, not just in showing. And Delon had more range than he is given credit for. The audience could see almost anything in his character, as in the self-love and manipulative charm of the ambitious Tancredi in “The Leopard” (1963). Or you could find a void, a lack of affect that transcends even Tom Ripley’s sociopathy into true emptiness, as in Jef in “Le Samourai” (1967). Delon, more than anyone else, reminds me of Greta Garbo, who was also called upon to rescue occasionally substandard material. Both could project all sorts of emotions in the course of a single close-up. Not just charm; Garbo and Delon could do that, but it was not their primary weapon. They did not need charm, because they could fascinate and exert an almost hypnotic attraction.

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

Along with those career highlights, there are surprises, such as Delon’s sympathetic turn in “Two Men in Town” (1973) as a bank robber paroled after 10 years. Delon’s character tries to get back on track with the help of a social worker, played by Jean Gabin. But the cop who arrested him (Michel Bouquet, uncharacteristically evil) harasses him in every way possible, and in the final act, “Two Men in Town” becomes an indictment of the death penalty. Written and directed by the talented but deeply disagreeable Jose Giovanni, it remains one of those roles that ran counter to Delon’s own far-right leanings—Delon has said more than once that he supports the death penalty.

But then any attempt to grapple with Delon, the varied and unbridled performer, would ultimately come up against his tumultuous off-camera existence, the things he said on the road, and whether he played by his own rules or even agreed with them. A longtime friend of far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, he made statements like, “He thinks of the interests of France first.” (Thankfully, Delon didn’t respond publicly when Le Pen suggested the actor would be ideal casting to play him in a biopic.) In the 2000s, Delon condemned the idea of ​​gay marriage — seemingly without so much as a glance back at the famous 1969 BBC interview in which he all but acknowledged having had affairs with men.

There’s more where that came from, but perhaps the darkest chapter in a life filled with them was the 1968 murder of Delon’s bodyguard Stefan Marcovic, whose body was found outside Paris, beaten, shot in the head, wrapped in a mattress cover and dumped in a garbage dump. Delon volunteered to speak to police and was eventually acquitted, but the murder was never solved. Did Delon take this sordid, terrifying episode as a message to take it easy on his known underworld associates? He didn’t. A scandal as wild as this one, one that involved the Corsican mafia and rumors of orgies, could have ended the career of another actor, even in the ’60s. Delon, who was filming “La Piscine” with his ex-lover Romy Schneider, barely skipped a beat. Jacques Deray’s film, in which Delon once again murdered Maurice Ronet, did well in France and the atmosphere of sunny decadence is still so strong that the film was a huge hit at the Film Forum in New York in 2021.

The Markovic Affair was still in the news in 1970 when Delon was asked by the New York Times if he cared about what some of his friends did for a living. Delon replied, “I don’t worry about what a friend does. Every man is responsible for his own actions.” With this Sinatra-esque attitude (he had admired Frank Sinatra since his youth), Delon went on to make several films that capitalized on his reputation. I particularly like Deray’s “Borsalino,” the story of two Marseille hoodlums (the other played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) in the 1930s who rise from petty criminals to major criminals; and “The Sicilian Clan,” a French-Italian gangster film directed by Henri Verneuil. In an early scene, Delon’s crook escapes from a police van by slitting the bed of the truck with a smuggled tool and lowering himself underneath. Delon hasn’t often played concentrated, sweaty fear, but here he does, making the scene incredibly tense.

In 1976, Delon produced and starred in “Mr. Klein,” a psychological drama about occupied Paris directed by former blacklister Joseph Losey. It is a layered, haunting, and extraordinary film about Robert Klein (Delon), a French Catholic art dealer who makes a fortune paying rock-bottom prices for paintings sold by desperate Jews. Suddenly, he realizes he may have been mistaken for another Robert Klein, who is Jewish. And so one Mr. Klein spirals into an obsessive search for the other. Delon loved this role of a man who initially feels well-protected but begins to sense and fear a much less privileged version of himself. But while the film “Mr. Klein” won awards, Delon’s terrific performance did not. Left-wing political filmmaker Costa-Gavras said he fought hard for Delon on the Cannes jury that year, but like many who admire the art, Costa-Gavras struggled with Delon’s apparent inability to stop making damaging public comments. It wasn’t long after “Mr. Klein” that Delon announced, “I am deeply anti-communist” — which was fine — and then added, as if the lack of controversy might damage his image, that if this made him a fascist, so be it.

If I have neglected most of Alain Delon’s private life, it is because it is more tiring than his politics and even less attractive. And perhaps it is clear by now that I have not mentioned something else: beauty. That once-in-a-lifetime face. Attractiveness is important in cinema, no matter how much we try to deny it or write around it. But your mother was right; looks are not everything, not even for an actor. Delon understood that, of course, and approached his own beauty with a good dose of French bluntness, as when an interviewer asked for the umpteenth time in 1990 whether it was a challenge to be handsome. The answer, loosely translated: “Physical beauty is a problem if you are beautiful and an idiot. Or beautiful and a bad actor. I dare say I don’t put myself in those categories. So beauty can be a problem. But it is someone else’s problem, someone who is jealous or resentful… Let’s be clear, physical beauty, for a man or a woman, if you have the rest, is a great asset. You have to recognize it.”

Watching Alain Delon is one of the great pleasures of cinema. But if handsomeness were all that mattered, Buster Crabbe would have been a superstar. Delon had the advantage, but in his acting he had the rest.