Mesmeric and Beautiful: Alain Delon, One of Cinema’s Most Mysterious Stars

There is a famous photograph of Alain Delon in 1967, sitting on a couch next to Marianne Faithfull, with a subdued Mick Jagger on the other side of her. This was taken around the time Faithfull was about to star in “The Girl on a Motorcycle,” in which she wore a sleek leather bodysuit that Delon’s character delighted in unzipping. Faithfull is leaning over intimately as Delon murmurs to her, her body language entirely enfolded into his. Jagger can only look down uneasily at his cigarette. Later, Faithfull would say she didn’t fancy Delon, but confirmed Jagger was very jealous.

It is hard to think of anyone who, even for a split second, could upstage Jagger at that moment. Yet, Delon did just that with his eerie, heartstopping, almost extraterrestrial gorgeousness. He was one of the most, if not the most, beautiful male stars in cinema history.

Delon had a mesmerizingly demure, long-lashed, almost feline look that could indicate something mysterious, wounded, or malign. This was very different from the more candid Hollywood beauty of Paul Newman or Robert Redford. Delon never made it in Hollywood but had an unlocatable charisma to go with his beauty. The dangerous apparent passivity and stillness of a predator got him cast in some of the most fascinating crime pictures of the era by French directors René Clément, Jacques Deray, and Jean-Pierre Melville, as well as the bold new Italian art cinema of Visconti and Antonioni. His exquisite face made him an exotic figure in working-class stories or lowlife dramas.

This beauty showed us the imprisoning effect of great looks, a common plight for female stars but rare for men. Tellingly, his first film credit was in a 1958 crime caper opposite fellow newcomer Jean-Paul Belmondo called “Sois Belle et Tais-Toi” (Be Beautiful and Shut Up) – a phrase normally addressed to a woman in that sexist age. Delon’s beauty imposed a stillness on him, a growing sense that the radiation of his glamour would be strongest when he was coolly immobile, letting his amazing face have its effect on the camera.

In his breakthrough movie, Delon played Rocco in Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers” in 1960. He is the brother who comes to Milan to be with his extended family and start a new aspirational life. However, he ends up sacrificing his wellbeing for his brothers, especially in pursuing a career in boxing, where that beautiful face would soon get damaged. In Visconti’s “The Leopard” (1963), Delon was the handsome, patrician Tancredi, heir to Burt Lancaster’s troubled and complex Prince of Salina.

A more quintessential Delon role came in the same year as Rocco: Tom Ripley in “Plein Soleil,” or “Purple Noon,” Clément’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” Delon’s unearthly perfection seemed creepy, as if he were imitating a human being. This man has grown used to the dazed, rapt expressions of people talking to him, accustomed to their submissive awe. Delon’s Ripley is a Dorian Gray portrait of male beauty and unscrupulous daring, untroubled by conscience. He was comparably cool and self-controlled in Deray’s psychological thriller “La Piscine,” where Delon’s face was like a pool: calm or churned up with violence.

He was similarly enigmatic and difficult in Antonioni’s “L’Eclisse” in 1962 as the nervy and conceited young stockbroker who embarks on an affair with Monica Vitti, one of the few female co-stars who could match Delon’s beauty. Louis Malle tapped into Delon’s strangeness by casting him in the “William Wilson” doppelganger story of his portmanteau movie “Spirits of the Dead” in 1968.

But it was in the crime pictures of Melville that Delon’s image became more iconic: clarified or possibly paralyzed by his sense of his image. He starred in “Le Samouraï” (1967), “The Red Circle” (1970), and the underrated “Un Flic” (1972). In these films, he is either the villain or a police officer but always with that impassive, enigmatically enclosed self-possession. In “Le Samouraï,” he is the cool, unsmiling hitman with the Anglicised name of Jef Costello in a Bogartian trench coat. This killer has a monkish vocation for killing, and there is something ascetic in Costello that corresponds to Delon’s willingness to impress his personality on the camera, like a silent film actor. He is reticent in the other two movies as well, especially as a hard-bitten cop who only really comes to life when responding to a call on his squad car radio.

My vote for Delon’s greatest role is in Joseph Losey’s Kafka-esque doppelganger mystery “Monsieur Klein” from 1976. Delon produced the movie and played Klein, a wealthy art dealer in occupied Paris with a handsome apartment, a beautiful mistress, and an elegant circle of friends. He has no great problems with the Nazis, especially as they boost his business. Terrified Jewish people come to him, offering paintings for sale to fund their escape from France. Klein exploits their desperation to get bargains. But then he starts getting a Jewish newsletter delivered to his door: evidently, there is someone else in Paris with his name, a Jew, and a terrible mistake has been made… hasn’t it? Or is someone trying to discredit him? Klein goes to the police, but worry they might think he actually is Jewish. His problems escalate until he is taken away in the roundup – one of the most disturbing screen portrayals of that shameful French historical episode.

Like the hitman in “Le Samouraï,” Klein is self-contained and withdrawn. Almost a decade on from the Melville crime classic, Delon’s impassivity has become refined and mandarin-like but morally compromised. There is a genius to his performance when he 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.

Delon’s career was prolific with many roles. His mature role as the ageing, cantankerous epicure Baron de Charlus in Volker Schlöndorff’s “Swann in Love” in 1984 is also notable, although Delon was not entirely relaxed in the part. In latter years, Alain Delon became notorious for his admiration for the far-right politics of the Front National and for some odious remarks about slapping women. However, he redeemed himself politically for his support for Losey and the study of antisemitism in “Monsieur Klein.” He was an icon and a symbol of the lost beauty of the 1960s.

Source: The Guardian