Remembering the Enchanting Alain Delon

If the handsomest American-born movie star ever was Montgomery Clift, the handsomest French star was Alain Delon, who died on August 18 at the age of 88.

But Alain Delon had more than physical beauty. As with Montgomery Clift, his acting was a thing of admirable subtlety and sensitivity. Born in 1935, he appeared during his long career in over eighty films. In paying tribute to him here, I will focus on what was probably his most celebrated performance — namely, his starring role in Plein Soleil (Purple Noon), René Clément’s 1960 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley.

I first saw Plein Soleil years ago, but not until after I’d seen Anthony Minghella’s 1999 American adaptation, which uses Highsmith’s title, several times. I’m a great admirer of the latter version, in which Matt Damon plays the seemingly earnest, wet-behind-the-ears, and down-at-his-heels American twentysomething Tom Ripley.

Ripley’s been paid generously by a rich shipbuilder, Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn), to travel to Italy and bring home Greenleaf’s spoiled, glamorous, egocentric son Dickie (Jude Law), who’s been living the life of a rich expatriate loafer with his equally rich girlfriend, Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), an aspiring writer, in the fictional coastal town of Mongibello.

Tom and Dickie strike up a friendship, which affords Tom a taste of a lifestyle he’s never known, but Dickie, a fickle and shallow soul, eventually tires of him, and Tom is left facing a return to penury back in the States.

The plot is much the same in Plein Soleil, but with some minor changes: in Minghella’s version, Tom never knew Dickie before coming to Italy, but becomes obsessed with, and even enamored of, him; in Clément’s version, the Dickie character is named Philippe (Maurice Ronet), and was a boyhood friend of Tom, who admits that when they were teenagers “I worshiped the ground that you walked on.”(READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: A Modern Colossus: Donald Trump)

Tom further explains to Marge (Marie Laforêt) that Philippe’s father disapproved of their friendship: “I wasn’t distinguished enough.”

In Minghella’s film, it makes total sense when the awkward, insecure Matt Damon becomes smitten with the dashing, self-assured Jude Law; in Clément’s film, however, Delon is so beautiful that he threatens to throw off the whole balance of the picture. How can Philippe look down on this god? And how can Tom be so desperately eager for Philippe’s, or anyone’s, approval and affection? In real life, guys and girls alike would be lining up to polish his shoes.

In both films, Tom kills his friend on a small boat and moves to Rome, where he proceeds to assume Greenleaf’s identity and, eventually, finds it necessary to dispatch Greenleaf’s obnoxious friend Freddy Miles, another rich American expat.

Minghella’s film has more major characters and plot twists, is more expensively produced, and (as one might expect from a 1999 Hollywood movie vis-à-vis a French film from 1960) moves a lot faster; but one of the signal virtues of Clément’s film is precisely its more unhurried, deliberate pace, which permits us to spend more time closely attending to Tom’s every move so that, even more than Matt Damon (who is excellent in Ripley), Delon draws us into his character as we follow every step of his macabre but inspired scheme.

Indeed, the chief difference between the two films is that while Minghella’s is a riot of excellent characterizations (not just by Damon, Law, and Paltrow but also by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cate Blanchett, Jack Davenport, Rebhorn, and Philip Baker Hall), Clément’s movie is, in essence, a tightly focused portrait of Tom, played with depth and nuance by the magnificent Delon, and full of small, telling realistic touches of the sort that shed light on our antihero but that have no place these days, alas, in a big-budget Hollywood picture.

In fact, it’s great to have both movies, each of which is splendid of its kind. If you wanted to teach a course in the difference between big-budget Hollywood star vehicles and prime examples of the French nouvelle vague, indeed, you could do worse than to screen these two adaptations of Highsmith’s story back to back.

And I strongly suspect that after watching both of them, what would linger in your memory is not the plot that Minghella has concocted, which is arguably even more ingenious than Highsmith’s original, and which keeps Damon constantly on the move, or even that film’s gorgeous music and cinematography but, first, Delon’s portrait of a lonely and enigmatic, if plainly psychopathic, young man who spends much of his screen time sitting, smoking, and contemplating.

And second, the ending of Clément’s film, which is even more stunning than that of Minghella’s, and which delivers a staggering hammer blow to Delon at what he believes to be his culminating moment of triumph.

Plein Soleil aside, Delon’s cinematic oeuvre is a bushel of riches. What’s particularly striking is Rocco and His Brothers, a Luchino Visconti film, released in the same year as Plein Soleil, that tells the story of a struggling southern Italian family that has relocated to Milan. It’s frankly remarkable to see the same young actor, in the course of the same year, exude a dark, complex, and inscrutable menace in one film and a genuine sweetness and innocence in another. (READ MORE: Snow White and the Witches of Hollywoke)

Delon’s later films include Visconti’s epic The Leopard (1963), based on the Lampedusa novel; Anthony Asquith’s The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), and Clément’s Is Paris Burning? (1966), the internationally successful account of the 1944 liberation of Paris.

One thing I learned about Delon from his obituaries that I didn’t know before was that throughout his life he loved dogs and cats and put a lot of his money and effort into helping animals. To me, that’s the kind of thing that really makes a person beautiful, whether he’s 28 or 88. May his work endure and his memory be blessed.

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