Alain Delon forever

Even though we all knew it was coming, the passing of Alain Delon a week or so ago at the age of 88, still feels nothing less than seismic. Probably my favourite French actor and certainly one of the leading men of 20th century cinema.

It is impossible to appreciate the huge body of work he has left behind in a single post. And, of course, he is just one of many iconic actors – iconic being an overused term, I know, but in this context, it’s justified – to pass in 2024, including Donald Sutherland, Shelley Duvall and Gena Rowlands. And there are more who can’t be far off, Michael Caine, Terence Stamp, Clint Eastwood, etc, they all in their advanced age. Someone should really go around and check on those guys, make sure they are okay.

But, yes, Delon was special. He was stunningly attractive, there is no other way to say it. He was also suave and stylish. I can’t think of a single image of him I have seen in which he looks anything less than a million dollars in terms of his fashion, grooming and just general savoir-faire.

Of course, there are stories of his links to organised crime, some not so great things he has said about women, and his support at one point for the National Front, although how deep and extended that was, I am not clear about. But, if you are reading this Substack, then, like me, you are on side with separating the art from the artist, in all but the most egregious circumstances. So, let’s talk about his films, 107 between 1949 and 2019. So many I have not seen. It is not the first time I have said this but looking at his filmography you realise that there is this whole body of French and European crime cinema that so many of us are not really cross. I know, I’m certainly not.

Much of work for Hollywood is also not greatly known. His first US role, Once a Thief, (1965), is almost completely buried. In it he plays a San Francisco ex-con who wants to go straight but can’t resist the lure of one last major heist. Delon had a major part in Mark Robson’s film about a French paratrooper unit assigned to bring order in Algeria during France’s effort to retain its colony, The Lost Command, a sort of commercial action version of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 classic, Battle of Algiers. The Lost Command also has Anthony Quinn, Claudia Cardinale, and George Segal (the latter in brown face as a commander in the Algerian resistance). And let’s not forget Michael Winner’s Scorpio (1973). Arguably one of Winner’s better efforts, Delon plays a freelance operative ordered to assassinate his former CIA mentor, played by Burt Lancaster.

Anyway, since his death, I’ve been thinking of my favourite Delon roles. Anyone can do a top ten. But I wanted to make it harder for myself and do a top five. Here they are.

Farewell, Friend (1968)

This heist film - which also made Charles Bronson a star in Europe - focuses on two former members of the French Foreign Legion, the criminally inclined Popp (Bronson) and the largely law abiding doctor, Barron (Delon). Reunited by coincidence in Paris, the two men get involved in a series of mishaps that see them commit to a potentially lucrative heist. But can they trust each other? Come for the wonderfully realised and tense as hell heist but stay for the palpably sexual bromance between Delon and Bronson.

The Swimming Pool (1969)

Two lovers, Marianne (Romy Schneider) and Jean-Paul (Delon) are spending their vacation in a villa on the French Riviera. The arrival of Marianne’s louche former lover, Harry (Harry Maurice Ronet) and his teenage daughter, Penelope (Jane Birkin), upends everything and results in a wonderfully evocative swirl of betrayal, sex and murder. A great thriller and, seriously, just inject the aesthetic of this film, everything about it, directly into my veins.

The Red Circle (1970)

While The Red Circle utterly fails the Bechdel Test, it is one of the best heist gone wrong films I have seen. A desperate group of criminals played by Delon – the head of the operation – Gian Maria Volonte & Yves Montand (dream team or what?) team up to rob a jewellery showroom, an extended scene that rivals the one in Jules Dassins’s Rififi (1955). Under Jean-Pierre Melville’s direction, the three men find murder and betrayal are all around them, while the police are breathing down their necks. The Red Circle also boasts one of the best characters with the DTs scenes since Lost Weekend.

Red Sun (1976)

I am not sure whether Terence Young’s Franco-Italian production Red Sun is an especially good film, but it is a solid and innovative western and Delon is wonderful in it. He plays Gauche, the leader of a gang of bandits alongside Link (another pairing with Bronson). A successful train robbery comes unstuck when Gauche steals a gold ceremonial samurai sword from Japanese ambassador who happens to be on board and double crosses Link. Link forms an uneasy alliance with one of the ambassador’s samurai bodyguards, played by Toshiro Mifune, to pursue Gauche, his gang and Gauche’s lover (Ursula Andress), a chase which involves lashing of double dealing, lots of samurai hijinks, and a major dust up with a group of Comanche indians.

Mr Klein (1976)

In my opinion, hands down Delon's best performance as cynical war profiteer in Nazi occupied Paris who finds his life unravelling when he is mistaken for a Jewish man of same name. A strange cat and mouse chase ensured as Klein chases his doppelgänger, who may not even exist. Interspersed with this are what appear at first as unrelated scenes of the Vichy administration mobilising its bureaucracy and police, but which are eventually revealed as preparations to arrest and deport Paris's Jewish population to concentration camps. In addition to real war time events, director Joseph Losey must have infused this with his own experience with HUAC in the early 1950s. Everything about this film, the washed out aesthetic, Klein's brushes with various uncaring officials, etc, serve to function as a noir infused metaphor for deliberate unseeing of horrific events. Mr Kein also interesting in terms of how it grids with Delon’s later comments about the National Front.

Revolution in 35mm Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960-1990

Regular readers will have read me banging the drum about my latest book in previous posts, Revolution in 35mm Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960-1990, and l am here to tell you that there is a lot more to come.

The e-book is already out (and can be found here) and the physical edition, which is quite a stunning production, if I do say so myself, is due to hit bookshelves in the US in mid-September, and can be pre-ordered at the publisher, PM Press’s site, here.

Co-edited with critic Samm Deighan, Revolution in 35mm focuses on arthouse and exploitation film, and the connections between the two, spanning from the Algerian war of independence and the early wave of post-colonial struggles that reshaped the Global South, through to the collapse of Soviet Communism in the very early 1990s. In the process, it takes in the rise of protest movements by students, workers, and leftist groups, as well as broader countercultural movements, Black Power, the rise of feminism, and so on. It also includes films that explore the splinter groups that engaged in violent, urban guerrilla struggles throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as the promise of widespread radical social transformation failed to materialize: the Weathermen, the Black Liberation Army and the Symbionese Liberation Army in the United States, the Red Army Faction in West Germany and Japan, and Italy’s Red Brigades.

My current focus regarding the book is its writing about the films about the Algerian war, as part of my preparation for an episode on the subject for Samm’s wonderful podcast, Eros + Massacre. In addition to Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966), which I write about in the book, we’ll also be looking at Youssef Chahine’s Jamila, the Algerian (1954) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1963).

I’ll be posting links to the podcast when it is live.