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Alain Delon had the kind of beauty that inspires poems and paintings. But it was a cold beauty. There was not the slightest softness to him. He kept his emotions close to his chest, allowing directors to project onto him whatever they needed. He could believably don any mask he was asked to wear, portray feeling with subtle conviction. Nevertheless, when the lights came up, any temporary grasp audiences had on him soon dissipated. His essence was “a pit of unknowability,” according to critic Sheila O’Malley. “The mystery remains intact. Always.”
Delon knew the stupefying effect his visage had on people, and considered it an impediment to being taken seriously as an actor; “I have been fighting for years to make people forget that I am just a pretty boy with a beautiful face. It’s a hard fight, but I will win it.”
Yet his beauty proved, time and again, to be a vital weapon in his actorly artillery. His particular brand of enigmatic charisma, exquisite mystique, was the engine behind many of the best European films of the 1960s—the first being 1960’s Purple Noon, which was the debut cinematic adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Tom Ripley (Delon) is a con artist, who’s finagled his way into an all-expenses paid trip to sunny Italy, ostensibly so he can bring irresponsible playboy Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet), back home to his father. Wheedling his way into his acquaintance, enjoying al fresco meals together in many a picturesque piazza, Tom finds he rather likes Philippe’s life, and wants it for himself. So he decides to murder him, and steal his identity. Unsurprisingly, this plan has its complications. Purple Noon tracks his painstaking attempts to get away with it.
Although Delon was peerlessly handsome, Maurice Ronet was seven years older, a little taller and broader, and more experienced in front of a camera. The discrepancy between the two actors helps to illuminate the film’s first act, where Tom is like a pesky little brother whom Philippe finds irritating, and just keeps around to make himself feel superior. He’s unnerved to discover Tom dressed in his clothes and impersonating him in front of a mirror, sure, but it’s easy enough to file away as a misplaced act of adoration. For a while, anyway.
In Purple Noon’s pivotal sequence, Tom, Philippe and Philippe’s girlfriend Marge (Marie Laforêt) head out for a jaunt in the ocean on a yacht. Throughout the movie, Philippe has enjoyed needling Tom about the difference in their statuses. That intensifies on the yacht. He mocks him for not knowing the right cutlery to use, he tries to make him feel like a third wheel via his make-out sessions with Marge—at one point, he maroons him in dinghy in the middle of the sea, and when he reels him back in, Tom has been badly sunburned.
During these “teasing” interactions, both men are all smiles, but Delon lets us see the rising hatred beneath Tom’s good-natured veneer. He grins, though there’s a cool fury in his eyes. Once Marge has been deposited back on dry land, after Tom engineers a fight between her and Philippe, the two men are alone in the middle of miles and miles of ocean.
This is when Delon’s mesmeric inscrutability takes flight. Earlier, Tom laughingly told Philippe of his plans to kill him. Philippe thought he was joking. But what with the mirror incident, and finding his own bank statements scuttled away with Tom’s things on the yacht… increasingly, he can’t be sure. Once Marge has left, they continue bantering about the “theoretical” murder, and how Tom would go about covering it up, as they play a game of cards. While Tom is as composed as ever, Philippe becomes ever more uneasy.
When he bends down to pick up a dropped ten of clubs, Tom plunges a knife into his chest.
As soon as he does so, Tom’s calm façade cracks in two, and his delicate face is overcome with pure terror. The gentle lapping of the waves becomes a choppy, elemental roar, and the brilliant blue sky clouds over. In moments, Tom has pulled himself together, charging around the wildly teetering vessel and disposing of the body. With his composure reclaimed, the rest of Purple Noon follows his continued attempts to cover his tracks, and live the life he’s stolen.
Delon’s performance in Purple Noon is fascinating for many reasons; primarily, because we’re watching an actor depict acting. Just as Delon knew he was beautiful, Tom is acutely aware of how he’s perceived by every person he comes across. Delon’s beauty is Tom’s shield, there to outwardly charm and reassure, allowing him cover to enact his nefarious plans.
And as we watch him switch between modes, the idea that Delon might be letting us in on his own process is intoxicating.
Tom is good at what he does, and revels in the technicalities of his grift, like learning how to exactly mimic Philippe’s signature. Because Delon’s own demeanor was so icy, he didn’t need to do much to convincingly transmit panic when things go less smoothly for Tom—when he just avoids bumping into Philippe’s father, or when an acquaintance discovers his plot. That Delon projected a natural unflappability made the pivots to alarm hit all the harder.
Our protagonist is not in any way a sympathetic character (between the Highsmith novel and its various adaptations, he’s often described as a psychopath), but when the mask slips, and Delon’s seemingly permanent air of cool deserts him, the vulnerability that replaces it comes as an uncanny valley kind of shock. It’s disconcerting to see beneath that perfect surface, that isn’t all as effortless as he makes it look. Of course, we know cerebrally that this is still Delon, and he’s still acting—yet what makes this first great performance of his so tantalizing is the way he peels back the layers, and dares tease us that we might catch a glimpse of the real him along the way.
If Purple Noon made Delon famous, the rest of his 1960s were dedicated to solidifying his future status as an icon. He worked with extraordinary directors like Luchino Visconti, Jean-Pierre Melville and Michelangelo Antonioni, and continued his partnership with Purple Noon’s director René Clément, churning out true classics—The Leopard, Rocco and His Brothers, L’Eclisse, Le Samouraï—with apparent ease. An attempt to break into America wasn’t quite as successful in terms of the movies it produced, but did at least succeed in getting his name known on both sides of the Atlantic. And in a macabre bookend to his decade, Delon killed Maurice Ronet in another body of water in another classic film: 1969’s The Swimming Pool (which would be remade by Luca Guadagnino as A Bigger Splash in 2016).
In all of Delon’s best films, the murky depths beneath that icy, perfect exterior are plumbed; the search for what really lies beneath, to find the known in that “pit of unknowability,” was the engine that powered a host of wonderful movies. While he never quite managed to shift his pretty boy image, throughout the 1960s, Delon proved that image was his strength—that there was far more use to that beautiful face of his than mere decoration.
Next week: things get sunnier again by the sea, with Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray.
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.