ALAIN DELON: From the heavens to the screen and back
Photo source: hvylya.net
Alain Delon, the ultimate heartthrob of European cinema and its de facto avatar, has passed away. Divinely aristocratic on screen, he could seamlessly fit into the artistic worlds of very different and highly iconic filmmakers. He was likely the last major film star in the classical sense of the word, the face of Dior.
His name frequently surfaced in connection with both compromising trivialities, such as an orgy involving Georges Pompidou, and questionable associations, like his ties with Corsican mafia leaders.
He held right-wing views but often worked with leftist filmmakers. Movies featuring him set trends and wielded such influence that they changed life itself in his native France. Young dandies in the late 1960s learned to wear coats like Delon, to stay silent like Delon expressively, and to repeat with the same calm composure: «I never lose». His classic film character’s name was even adopted as a pseudonym by porn idol Rocco Siffredi.
One piercing look from Alain Delon in the finale of the drama «Two Men in Town» (1973) was enough to abolish the death penalty in France. Yet his bold, politically incorrect statements by today’s standards led to him being labeled a racist, sexist, and homophobe.
Delon was both idolized and simultaneously targeted for «cancellation» through a special petition that gathered more than 25,000 signatures in the spring of 2019. But he never broke, never bent, remaining true to himself until the very end. Just as a true star should. A star like no other.
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t the end of 1968, Alain Delon became embroiled in a grim criminal case involving the mysterious murder of his Serbian bodyguard, who allegedly blamed the actor in a farewell letter, claiming Delon had ordered the hit. General Charles de Gaulle himself appeared at the trial. The judge could not ignore this and gave the President of France the floor. De Gaulle stood up and said, «I have nothing to say except one thing — France has only one Alain Delon». Judging by the way the press responded to the death of the great actor, one might conclude that the general was slightly mistaken: there is only one Alain Delon, not just for France, but for the entire world. He is a whole world.
«You are too handsome!» people kept telling Alain Delon at the very beginning of his career. In his youth, he was not just handsome but divinely beautiful, carrying with him the weight of a difficult childhood and service in the Marine Corps.
«He was the embodiment of beauty, and that taught him to be modest, bringing to the forefront other aspects of his nature — charm and elegance», recalled actor Jean-Claude Brialy, who was the first to suggest that Alain Delon try acting and brought him to the Cannes Film Festival. And then came Luchino Visconti. The great Italian director was introduced, by chance, to a completely unknown young man, and that young man inspired him (to say the least) to the idea for his next film, Rocco and His Brothers (1960).
«I needed his spontaneity… If I had been forced to take another actor, I wouldn’t have made the film», the director later asserted. A descendant of Lombard dukes, Visconti dreamed of making a film about boxers, complete with detailed fight scenes, sports rivalry, and perpetually steamy showers. However, as an intellectual, he crafted the boxers’ personal lives with such psychological depth that had never been seen in cinema before, only in literature, in the works of Dostoevsky.
Rocco and His Brothers caused a sensation, a revolution: it set the course for the future of the Italian proletariat and created some of the most unforgettable scenes in cinema history, like the parting of a man and a woman in coats on the roof of Milan Cathedral. It also set fashion trends (in winter, a turtleneck sweater, scarf, cap, and gloves, absolutely no jackets or coats) and established Alain Delon as a fashion icon.
Seven years later, Jean-Pierre Melville would do the same with Delon, casting him in the lead role of his film Le Samouraï (1967) — the most significant crime film of all time. The role that finally shaped and cemented Delon’s «otherworldly» image, his divinity.
Both films confirmed that Delon was not just an actor but a true star in the classical sense. An actor can become a star, but a star doesn’t have to be an actor. An actor is obliged to change depending on the role. A star must remain true to themselves. And that’s a more challenging task than changing with each film, constantly transforming.
Melville recalled how, during filming, Delon would speed into the narrow gates of a garage in an alley without hesitation. «This daring is inherent in every star. High-class professionals don’t need to be told how to hold a glass or smoke; their movements and gestures are confident and spontaneous. I really like the American definition of a star: it’s someone ‘just like everyone else, but a little bit better’».
This «little bit better» is expressed in the ability to influence the audience directly. Melville said of Delon: «The last star of those I know. He’s a Hollywood star of the 1930s. He even devoted himself to the sacred duty of 1930s stars: to sow scandal».
Indeed, Delon was a star out of time: a «bad-good guy» who had seen things, known women, hit the jackpot, and made mistakes he tried to correct. The ambiguity of his life experience was reflected in his lone-wolf gaze and the scar just under his chin, a reminder of his service in Indochina.
Delon played the best of the bad guys and the worst of the good guys — whether it was the elegantly inscrutable adventurer Tom Ripley in Purple Noon (1960), impersonating the wealthy man he had killed, the opportunist Tancredi with his cold beauty and the black eye patch in The Leopard (1963); the twenty-year-old hoodlum Francis Verlot, challenging the hardened thief Charles in Henri Verneuil’s The Sicilian Clan (1963); the lonely and beautiful hitman Jeff Costello in Le Samouraï (1967); the tragically doomed thief Corey, walking into a police ambush in Le Cercle Rouge (1970); the retired safecracker driven to sin and the guillotine by a heartless investigator’s petty suspicion in the drama Two Men in Town (1973); or the unshaven and weary professor in the mustard-colored coat from Valerio Zurlini’s The Professor (1972).
These were roles in which not so much the French as the Americans — Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart — had previously excelled. What gave Delon’s character particular credibility was the weight of his own past life.
There’s the early divorce of his parents, who sent three-year-old Alain to be raised by a nanny whose husband worked as a prison guard; the childhood loneliness and difficult temperament, which forced young Alain to change five schools in just one year; the frequent run-ins with the police; time spent in the brig for breaking military discipline (once, Delon stole a regimental Jeep and drove it into a ditch); several unsuccessful attempts to build his own family, different from what he had with his parents; unrecognized children (including a son born to Velvet Underground vocalist Nico); and a heart repeatedly broken by separations from the women he loved.
And then there was Romy Schneider, whose breakup he never fully recovered from, spending the rest of his life talking to her portraits scattered around him. In the summer of 1968, four years after the sudden and mysterious end of their engagement, Delon pulled Schneider into the crime drama The Swimming Pool, and as they played the lead roles, they seemed to ask with their characters’ eyes what they were too afraid to ask each other directly — tormenting each other with suspicions, testing each other with obscurity, and puzzling each other with tenderness.
The entire film’s action unfolds through the glances and reactions of the couple. It’s astonishing how harshly the great stars of the 60s treated themselves. We, the modern audience, call them stars. But for the 1950s, they were anti-stars who infused the shadows on the screen with theatrical psychology and all sorts of existentialism.
Delon, who idolized Marlon Brando and often said he was willing to play a butler in any film featuring Brando, was, in many ways, his opposite. The great American actor transformed himself according to the «method» (the Stanislavski system adapted in America). Delon, on the other hand, always remained Alain Delon.
He never really «played» anyone. He always simply lived in front of the camera, much like his idol Jean Gabin. «And I am the same. You see, there are comedians, and there are actors. Comedians act, they perform, while actors live on screen. That’s my creative method», Delon said.
«The only thing I am completely proud of is my career», said the actor in May 2019 when he was honored at Cannes with the Palme d’Or for lifetime achievement. This rare and prestigious award, previously given to only a few — Jeanne Moreau, Clint Eastwood, Agnès Varda, and Woody Allen — was presented to Delon by his daughter, Anouchka Delon, after a beautiful speech in which the actor noted that over 62 years, he had appeared in 89 films. Among them are The Leopard, Purple Noon, Rocco and His Brothers, The Policeman, Le Cercle Rouge, The Sicilian Clan, Monsieur Klein, The Widow Couderc, The Assassination of Trotsky, and Swann in Love.
That was the second time I saw Alain Delon cry with my own eyes. I saw his slightly faded blue eyes filled with tears. He wasn’t crying in a movie but in real life. The first time was in the very hall of the Cannes «Palais» ten years before the events described.
Cannes was presenting a restored version of The Leopard, prepared by the Scorsese Foundation in collaboration with GUCCI. I was sitting very close to Delon and Claudia Cardinale, who had flown to the Riviera to present the film. And I was watching the screen not so much (though Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece, after restoration, looked as if it were in 3D) as Delon’s reactions.
While Martin Scorsese, sitting behind him, was biting his nails, Delon was crying. And when the screen showed a close-up of Burt Lancaster’s tear-streaked face, Delon literally broke down in tears. He wiped his eyes and whispered something to Claudia Cardinale. «They’re all gone, all of them. We’re the only ones left…» Claudia recounted his words to me three years later.
Delon left cinema, in a significant sense, in 2008 with his sharply self-ironic role of Caesar in Asterix at the Olympic Games. It wasn’t so much that he had exhausted his eternal star age and couldn’t bear the realization of it. He was simply deeply hurt and withdrew. First into the solitude of his estate in Douchy and now to the heavens from which he once descended to the screen.
He left to join his era to Visconti, Clément, Antonioni, Gabin, Melville, Belmondo, and his beloved Romy. He went on his own, without any euthanasia, as he had first planned.
His body was buried in a chapel, next to the thirty-five graves of all his beloved Malinois — his «real» dogs, as he called them. His last beloved shepherd, Loubo, who, according to his will, was to be buried alongside him, was saved from euthanasia by Delon’s close friend Brigitte Bardot. Loubo will live.
The case of the bodyguard’s murder was closed shortly after that triumphant speech by de Gaulle due to a lack of evidence.
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