Cop and thug, grace and violence, progressive acts and reactionary ideology, all through his profession and life, the actor, who died on the age of 88, walked a tightrope.
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Within the antagonistic star couple he shaped with the extraverted, cheeky Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon at all times embodied silence, muteness and self-enclosure. On the discharge of Alain Cavalier’s L’Insoumis (The Unvanquished, 1964), François Mauriac wrote this sly praise in Le Figaro littéraire: “He by no means speaks so effectively as when he is silent.” Now we have to query this shortage of phrases. Was it the value of that carnal, brutal seduction that dispenses totally with phrases? Was it a break with a usually French custom based on a love of language and rhetoric? Was it the signal of some unmentionable secret to be protected? However what secret? Maybe that of the actor’s muted ambivalence, a trait that finest defines him, as a person and as an actor, and explains the disturbance he arouses.
It is understood that the shocks that trigger this disturbance have to be saved quiet. Nice artwork and vile commerce. Grace and violence. Angelism and depravity. Femininity and virility. Regulars and mistresses. The cop and the thug. Progressive acts and reactionary ideology. There’s an excessive amount of scandal in holding all of it collectively. The signal of duality, stamped like a fascinating infamy on the frontispiece of his profession, arrived very early, when he took over from Gérard Philipe. The dates are hanging. The idol of French cinema within the Nineteen Fifties and the embodiment of an idealized custom, the light, romantic Philipe died of most cancers in 1959. The earlier 12 months, Delon landed his first main function in Pierre Gaspard-Huit’s Christine, a mediocre remake of Max Ophuls’ Liebelei, during which he performed a younger lieutenant in love however destined for a tragic destiny.
This function shouldn’t be thus far faraway from the one performed by Philipe in one in all his best successes, René Clair’s Les Grandes Manœuvres (The Grand Maneuver, 1955). This was not the primary coincidence between the 2 male icons of French cinema, as Christian-Jaque proved when he directed Fanfan la Tulipe (1952) with the previous and La Tulipe noire (The Black Tulip, 1964) with the latter, 12 years aside. Delon performed the twin function of dual brothers, aristocrats working for justice on the eve of the French Revolution. Nevertheless it was clearly not a lot within the resemblance as within the dissimilarity to Philipe that Delon would come to interchange him within the hearts of audiences.
Ambiguous and chic usurper
Removed from the picture of his predecessor, who was infinitely darker, extra devious, extra thuggy and wilder, Delon present in René Clément the director who outlined his picture, entrusting him with the function of Tom Ripley in Plein soleil (Purple Midday, 1960), tailored from the novel by Patricia Highsmith. An ambiguous, elegant and devastatingly good-looking usurper, he murders Maurice Ronet’s character, symbolically ridding himself of this potential rival, one other good-looking man in troubled waters. This double face was usually discovered strolling a tightrope in his nice movies, whether or not because the wicked revolutionary in Luchino Visconti’s Le Guépard (The Leopard, 1963) or because the far-right militant seized by grace in L’Insoumis.
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