Dark Angel

Alain Delon, Icon of Cinema Chic

By CHRIS SCHMIDT

So few male film stars become style icons, you can almost count them on one hand. Gary Cooper, Steve McQueen, perhaps Warren Beatty in "Shampoo," maybe Richard Gere in "American Gigolo." And of course Cary Grant, whom Audrey Hepburn, in "Charade," memorably asked, "Do you know what's wrong with you? Nothing."

But extend the field beyond the boundaries of American film, and the number of cine-style icons grows exponentially. Case in point: Alain Delon, who is the subject of a retrospective through August at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater entitled, "Man in the Shadows: The Films of Alain Delon."

If this legendary French actor's name isn't as familiar as that of Jean-Paul Belmondo or Gerard Depardieu, it could be because Mr. Delon, who began appearing in films in 1957, never quite found his signature role. He's appeared before the cameras of such legendary directors as Godard, Antonioni, Visconti, and Jean-Pierre Melville, but his range as an actor is limited mostly to brooding, and a kind of wincing hauteur that earned him the sobriquet, "Ice-Cold Angel."

What Mr. Delon indisputably has is presence. Phillip Lopate compared Mr. Delon to Garbo, which seems apt. Both actors are silent more often than not, and their star charismas rely heavily on sexual ambiguity.

In Mr. Delon's case, it's his pretty-boy looks -- calling to mind a less boyish, darker James Dean -- that feminize him. (Those same good looks may also have limited him from being taken seriously as an actor; Pauline Kael complained that in Visconti's "Rocco and His Brothers," the actor was "lighted as if he were Hedy Lamarr.")

Mr. Delon's breakout role was as Tom Ripley in "Purple Noon," a 1961 French adaptation by Rene Clement of Patricia Highsmith's novel,"The Talented Mr. Ripley." More than 30 years before Matt Damon appeared on a Portofino beach in a fluorescent-yellow bathing suit, Mr. Delon was the original drifter-on-the-make.

"Purple Noon" is not a markedly better film than Anthony Minghella's 1999 adaptation, but it's more fun,in part because Mr.Delon is far more dashing than the doppelgaenger whose identity he assumes. Kael summed up the film by writing, "When Delon tries on [co-star Maurice] Ronet's clothes, it's clear that they look better on him."

This, in a nutshell, may be Mr. Delon's greatest appeal as a star: The clothes look better on him than on anybody else on screen.(Though noteworthy supporting players in "Purple Noon" are the Gucci leather accessories in chestnut and butterscotch.)

The role of Ripley alone is enough to grant Mr. Delon a sizable footnote in the annals of style, but the actor had a second act, sartorially speaking, in the early 1970s, as the avatar of policier cool. Perennially "incognito" in a natty trench coat in Melville's "Le Samurai," Mr. Delon's signature gesture in his role as hit man is a fastidious straightening of his fedora after every deed, however ugly (an affectation the actor reportedly cribbed from the director himself).The message: in the movies, good fashion sense overcomes any number of moral shortcomings -- even murder.