The Markovic case was still in the news in 1970 when the New York Times asked Delon if he was bothered by what some of his friends did for a living. Delon replied, “I'm not bothered by what a friend does. Everyone is responsible for his own actions.” With this Sinatra-like attitude (he admired Frank Sinatra since childhood), Delon went on to make multiple films that built on his reputation. I especially like Deray's “Borsalino,” the story of two Marseille criminals (the other played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) in the 1930s who rise from petty crime to major crime; and “The Sicilian Clan,” a French-Italian gangster film directed by Henri Verneuil. In an early scene, Delon's criminal escapes from a police transport by cutting the bottom of the truck with a smuggled tool and then climbing down underneath. Delon hasn't often displayed concentrated, sweaty fear, but he does here, making the sequence incredibly tense.
In 1976, Delon produced and starred in “Mr. Klein,” a psychological drama about occupied Paris directed by the formerly blacklisted Joseph Losey. It is a multilayered, disturbing and exceptional film about Robert Klein (Delon), a French Catholic art dealer who makes a fortune paying rock-bottom prices for paintings sold by desperate Jews. Suddenly, he realizes that he may have been mistaken for another Robert Klein, who is Jewish. Thus, one Mr. Klein falls into an obsessive search for the other. Delon loved this role of a man who at first feels well protected but comes to sense and fear a far less privileged version of himself. But while the film “Mr. Klein” won awards, Delon's superb performance did not. The left-wing political filmmaker Costa-Gavras said he fought hard to get Delon on the Cannes jury that year, but like many others who admire art, Costa-Gavras was confronted by Delon’s apparent inability to stop making noxious public comments. Indeed, it wasn’t long after “Mr. Klein” that Delon proclaimed “I am profoundly anti-communist” — which, okay — and then added, as if a lack of controversy could damage one’s image, that if that made him a fascist, tough luck.
If I have neglected most of Alain Delon's personal life, it is because it is more exhausting than his politics and even less attractive. And perhaps by now it has become obvious that I am not mentioning something else: beauty. That face that appears once in a lifetime. Attractiveness matters in cinema, however much we try to deny it or write about it. But your mother was right: appearance is not everything, not even for an actor. Delon, of course, understood this and approached his own beauty with a strong dose of French frankness, as when an interviewer in 1990 asked him for the umpteenth time if it was a task to be beautiful. The answer, roughly translated: “Physical beauty is a problem when you’re both handsome and an idiot. Or handsome and a bad actor. I dare say I don’t put myself in those categories. So beauty can be a problem. But it’s someone else’s problem, someone jealous or spiteful… Let’s be clear, physical beauty, for a man or a woman, when you have the rest, is a great advantage. Let’s admit it.”
Watching Alain Delon is one of the greatest pleasures of cinema. But if beauty was all that mattered, Buster Crabbe would have been a superstar. Delon had the edge, but in his performance, he had everything else, too.