DIABOLICALLY YOURS, A Tribute to Alain Delon

We’ll always have Paris

***Thank you for supporting my work with a membership.***

“Giving Alain Delon dialogue is redundant. He acts with his eyes.”—me on Twitter, 12.24.21

Alain Delon could do more with his eyes than any other actor.

He could go from cruel to vulnerable to frightened all in the same moment.

Like that scene with Jean Gabin in prison from Two Men In the Town.

Sure, some of that was the directing. Such auteurs as Jean-Pierre Melville gave us Delon in Le Samouraï — trenchcoat, fedora, sad blue eyes, gunsels on railroad bridges. Melville understood Delon didn’t need dialogue to get the point across.

Delon gave good face.

I usually don’t like my actors pretty, but Delon was so good I got past his beauty.

He died today at 88, two years after Jean-Luc Godard, who died a year after Jean-Paul Belmondo.

I felt better when they all were alive.

When I started getting death threats again last year, I went to Videotheque and bought posters. Above my bed is Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura, and Alain Delon. They’re all packing. So anywhere you stand in my bedroom, the Sicilian Clan has a bead on you. It’s uncanny, really. I feel well protected. Delon, a foster care runaway, had a fondness for his underworld friends.

I have a fondness for the French New Wave — the post-war despair, the bad cops and ennui, directors who read books, actors who box, women who don’t need Hollywood to be beautiful, the real Resistance, Paris in the rain, all of it.

I was not prepared to mourn Alain Delon.

I even watched his cop show, Frank Riva, where he reunited with his longtime love, actress Mireille Darc. That’s when I noticed that it just doesn’t matter how French actors age — they’re poetry in motion in the streets of Paris.

My feelings for Delon were complicated after he proved to be far-right in his later years, but I am well acquainted with separating the artist from their art, and he found some redemption in Monsieur Klein — an important film about anti-semitism.

Delon was cinema starfire.

Like Gabin, he tried to make it in America, and if you haven’t seen The Swimming Pool with Romy Schneider, omigawd.

If you haven’t seen him in Girl On a Motorcycle with Marianne Faithful, well shit.

If you haven’t seen him in Julien Duvivier’s Diabolically Yours — an amnesia thriller mind game — sigh. Delon in peak beauty.

You only have to see Le Samouraï once to never forget what Delon looks like smoking on a bed — resigned to his solitude in a cinereal, decaying room, more tomb than flat — his only friend a caged bird.

A few weeks ago, I went to Videotheque — my local video store — to see a screening of director René Clément’s Purple Noon, based on the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. Seeing Delon on the big screenish was swoony, the scenes from Italy, breathtaking.

I think I’ll remember him in the second to the last scene. Sunbathing in impossibly small shorts in Mongibello, thinking he got away with the perfect crime, just before The Heat closes in.

Or maybe the final scene of Jacques Deray’s Borsalino, where he gangsters around with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Marseilles — flipping a coin in homage to the original Scarface. As Belmondo is gunned down — dying as only Belmondo could, part ballet, part boxer — Delon, movie star stunning in a white suit, cradles him in his arms.

Those eyes.

I’m not ready for this. But we’ll always have Paris — a still dark, monochromatic room with curling smoke and peeling wallpaper, bird tweeting melancholy, rain crashing tragically, fedora at the ready.

****

****

Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrading to Paid Member

• Upgrading to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

• Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹

More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

🤍

Begin each day with a grateful heart.

🤍

Starfire.