SOMETIMES, it’s important to separate the art from the artist, no matter how hard that may prove to be.
With his lifetime of family scandals and his depressing fondness for far right politics, Alain Delon is a perfect case in point. The French actor, who passed away earlier this week at the age of 88, may well have been a deeply flawed human being beset by all manner of personal demons, but there’s no denying the quality of many of his finest on-screen performances.
A cursory spool back through something like Le Samourai (1967) should be enough to remind even his harshest critic that we’re talking about an actor with serious onscreen charisma here. The good looks are clear, his dark and moody beauty always there to see whatever the quality of the production, and to say the camera loves him is so obvious it’s almost laughable - but it’s that strange big screen charisma that truly sets him apart and marks him out as a cinematic giant for the ages.
Finding his ideal director in Jean-Pierre Melville, Delon is French cool personified as the fedora wearing killer for hire in Le Samourai. Plot wise, Melville’s film is nothing special. It’s a dark and smoky visual delight that places style firmly over content. Delon is Jef Costello, a cold hearted assassin who kills off a nightclub owner, discovers that those who have hired him have set him up and eventually gets chased down by the police through the Paris Metro. Beyond that lies nothing much you wouldn’t find in a hundred low-rent film noirs.
It’s Delon’s unique presence that lifts Le Samourai up and away from the crowd. He looks amazing throughout and his well practiced poker face gives nothing away: barely speaking as the story unfolds, he is seemingly more interested in adjusting his hat so he looks just right than actually engaging with the chaos unfolding all around him. Yet, despite the lack of raw emotion, Delon smoulders on screen.
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He was just 32 when the film was released but he imbues each frame he graces with a gravitas of an actor twice his age.
There are, predictably, women involved in Melville’s underworld epic, and their input to Costello’s life is important, but neither the rich lover (Natalie Delon, his then wife) or the jazz musician (Caty Rosier) cause him that much consternation. He’s a professional with no room for sentiment, you see.
At his peak in the 60s and 70s, Delon was adored in his homeland and idolised in many international markets, including Latin America, Japan and China, which were quick to take him to their hearts once the cultural revolution kicked in, but he never really translated to American audiences. Perhaps he was too ‘cool’, too emotionally distant and aloof to truly connect with the less guarded expectations of most Stateside cinema goers, who like their vistas wide and their heroes as open books.
Delon was never open. There’s a quote at the start of the film about no solitude being greater than a Samurai’s. In many ways, Delon patented that solitude for himself, both on-screen and off.
