Alain Delon

Now Alain Delon has passed away. He died yesterday at the age of 88. I just watched him last week in Purple Noon, a movie in which, as he so often did throughout the '60s, he played a killer. Something about that mesmerising, impossible symmetry of his cool good looks suggests someone who sees himself as above human law and morality. Perhaps that's also why he played Zorro in the '70s. I haven't seen that one.

To those interested in art films, a frequent image is of Delon as the quiet contract killer in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai. There's nothing especially Japanese about the movie beyond the title but a few years later, in 1971, he costarred with Mifune Toshiro, cinema's preeminent samurai, in Red Sun, a movie that also featured Charles Bronson and Ursula Andress. Maybe that'll give some of you Americans reading an idea of the calibre of celebrity enjoyed by Delon all over the rest of the world. For whatever reason, he never did become as well known in the U.S. Of course, nowadays, the kids don't even know Cary Grant, so maybe it all evens out.

Here's Delon in an eerie, beautiful scene from Purple Noon:

Delon wasn't always cool and remote. He played a man constantly on the edge of panic in the paranoid thriller Monsieur Klein. But even when he was playing an icy killer, the thing that made it work was the impression of a crack here and there, a glance to suggest uncertainty, a self doubt that erects a bulwark of arrogance. He exhibited one of those rare, perfectly balanced sets of qualities that make a star.