Hommage à Alain Delon

Hommage à Alain Delon 

Few people have been as handsome as Alain Delon and fewer still were actors that were as good as Delon was. His active struggle against his own, otherworldly
beauty gave many of his early performances such an interesting tension.

His Tom Ripley in Plein Soleil is so handsome that you can’t take your eyes off of him – not necessarily a very convenient thing for a criminal. Yet a lot of Delon’s best films were crime films, from his iconic, stoically cool collaborations with Jean-Pierre Melville – including Le Cercle rouge – to more flashy fare like La Piscine and Borsalino, crime stories fit the actor like a glove.

Even in a film as detached as Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, the director manages to harness the beauty of his star to suggest that things may be pretty on the outside but that that doesn’t mean that all’s well within…