Alain Delon’s chilly beauty. RIP

Alain Delon thought, “A world without Gena Rowlands is not a world worth living in.”

I put a piece up on my Substack about Delon which I wrote years ago, and it was his beauty and how it operated in very disturbing ways. I re-worked it a bit. It’s not an in-depth role-by-role tribute, it’s really more a meditation on the most obvious thing about him and how much it was a part of what he did onscreen. One of my all-time faves.

My friend Dan wrote a great tribute on his Substack.

When you look like Alain Delon, you inhabit a special category, and what’s notable is just how menacing he made that “most beautiful of them all” category seem. During his headiest days as a movie star, and even long afterward, Delon would often refer to himself in the third person, as in, “But of course Alain Delon would do that,” and so he was hyper-conscious of his image as a pretty-boy tough guy in a trench coat who walked through life in a kind of trance, as he does in perhaps his most famous movie, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967).

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