Dudes (do not) Rock: Au revoir, Monsieur Delon
On the Passing of A Beautiful Monster, Alain Delon
Hi, welcome back to Sisters Under the Mink’s ongoing essay series, Dudes Rock!, about men and masculinity at the movies. I felt I absolutely had to write about the loss of the great film star Alain Delon, and his legacy. Please forgive my lateness, but expect plenty more to come from me this month!
If you care about movies, you probably heard about the passing of French superstar Alain Delon a few weeks ago, aged 88. If you didn’t know anything about him & wanted to boil it down to two main takeaways from the various obits and tributes: he was beautiful, and he was terrible. Here was an icon of 60s cinema and a total bully; a tough-guy actor with an angelic face, who spent much of his time hanging out with gangster thugs and right-wing politicians. For someone whose bread & butter has long been classic cinema, the conundrum of great movies made by bad people is hardly new to me. I have long loved and admired film stars and artists who give you cause to do a lot of so-called ‘separating’ from the art. But let’s hold that thought for a moment, here, and talk about the art.
I saw images of Alain Delon before I ever saw one of his films. Firstly: his deceptive boyishness and cold stare under a fedora in Le Samourai (1967), and him looking tanned and seductive in Plein Soleil (1960), Rene Clement’s French adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. I have loved him since I was a teenager with a Tumblr, following a lot of 60s French cinema accounts because of my fondness for Jean-Luc Godard. One day, I was scrolling aimlessly and nearly struck down dead by the concentrated erotic power of a gif of Delon as the aforementioned Ripley. I had to know who this man was, and how it was possible for someone to look like that.
It feels a touch silly to mention this before discussing Delon’s towering place in Melville’s ritualistic crime cinema (Le Cercle Rouge is a favourite) or Luchino Visconti’s sweeping images of decadence and decay (The Leopard, Rocco and his Brothers). But the fact remains that no matter how you first encounter him, Alain Delon -- above and beyond looking like that -- is startling. It’s the word I keep thinking of when I try to articulate what it is that’s so special about him as an actor. Yes, he startled me that day while I was scrolling Tumblr. But it’s much more than that: it’s in his body language, his physicality itself. Here is an actor who is so still, so controlled; precise in both his movement and his mien. He has a watchful, silent quality, coiled as though he’s about to strike. And he often is.