Pour le weekend ...

An Alain Delon tribute, using mainly clips from our perennial favourites PLEIN SOLEIL, L'ECLISSE, LE SAMOURAI ...

Above: Renato Salvatori & Alain in Visconti's ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS; Alain with Monica .... and with Visconti and Claudia on THE LEOPARD.

Pour le weekend: '60 European glamour

Does European glamour get better than this?  Soon: '70s and '80s glamour ...

Some of our '60s European favourites: Alain with Marie Laforet, Romy, Monica, Claudia, Deneuve & Dorleac, Anouk, Audran, Belmondo, Vitti & Stamp in MODESTY BLAISE, Jean Sorel & Robert Hossein in that terrific thriller CHAIR DE POULE, 1963, (both in their 80s now, as are Loren, Delon, Bardot, Aimee, Belmondo etc), Brigitte avec Laurent Terzieff in Scotland for TWO WEEKS IN SEPTEMBER, a 1967 cult favourite, and Sophia with that kinky boots moment in ARABESQUE ! Lots more on all these at their labels.

Star, 80

The latest addition to the 80s club - Alain Delon - 80 yesterday, joining Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot and the rest. We have used this photo of Alain before - from Clement's 1963 LES FELINS. It may be time to see PLEIN SOLEIL again .... lots more Alain at label. 

I might have to invest in the new Blu-ray of L'ECLISSE for those perfect black and white images and Antonioni landscapes ... Methinks 80 is the new 70 ...

Delon & Laforet, again

And to round off this session on 1960s French glamour, here once again are some terrific stills of Alain Delon and Marie Laforet in Rene Clement's PLEIN SOLEIL from Patricia Highsmith's THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY .... feel the heat of the mediterranean ...

A new Mr Ripley at 60, plus Carol too ...

Tom Ripley is 60 – he first appeared in 1955 in Patricia Highsmith’s novel THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY. I had a Pan paperback edition when I was a teenager, circa 1962, and a few editions since, but I just had to get this new 60^th anniversary hardback, from Virago, a handsome volume for the bookshelf, with new introduction, etc. Its a book I love re-reading. Highsmith's lucid prose draws one in from the first sentence. 

We like Ripley – and his Alain Delon incarnation a lot, here at the Projector – as per the labels. Rene Clement’s 1960 film PLEIN SOLEIL, shot in 1959, captures that high end Mediterranean glamour perfectly, and entranced me when I was 14. I did not relate to the 1999 film much at all, as Anthony Minghella expanded and changed the characters and the ‘50s fashions were too fussy and overdone – back in the 1959 film they – Delon, Marie Laforet, Maurice Ronet – looks very smart casual wearing clothes that still work now.  The book, too, is surprisingly frank for one written in the mid-'50s about Tom and the gay milieu he lived in New York (it starts with Tom sharing a grotty room with an obviously gay window dresser who is putting Tom up for a while, before Mr Greenleaf sends him to Italy ...), before more erotic frissons in Italy. Back in the Fifties, before mass air travel, a trip to Europe on an ocean liner was a treat indeed - by page 50 Tom has left seedy New York behind and arrives in that Italian village ...

Reading the book again one realises how easy it must have been to impersonate someone else back in that pre-internet world without computers, the risk of being photographed on cellphones or on constant CCTV ... 

Its shaping up to a Highsmith year, with Todd Haynes’ film of CAROL finally coming out of the traps, after very positive reviews at Cannes recently. If its half as good as his FAR FROM HEAVEN ….

I have just read her novel CAROL, here is the blurb:

Therese is just an ordinary sales assistant working in a New York department store just before Christmas when a beautiful, alluring woman in her thirties walks up to her counter. Standing there, Therese is wholly unprepared for the first shock of love. Therese is an awkward 19 year old with a job she hates and a boyfriend she doesn’t love; Carol is a sophisticated, bored suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce and a custody battle for her only daughter. As Therese becomes irresistibly drawn into Carol’s world, she soon realizes how much they both stand to lose …

First published pseudonymously in 1952 as THE PRICE OF SALT, CAROL is a hauntingly atmospheric love story set against the backdrop of Fifties New York. 

It was a bit hit at the time, the first lesbian love story with a happy ending …. As Highsmith says in the Afterword at the end. The thriller element comes into force too as the women realise they are being followed on their extended car trip and decide to confront the detective, and Carol has a gun ...

THE TALENTER MR RIPLEY also begins in Fifties New York with jittery Tom trying to evade that man who is following him through the bars of that gay milieu he inhabits – he thinks it is one of his shady deals coming apart but he turns out to be the father of Dickie Greenleaf, setting that plot in motion ….

Cate Blanchett, whom one imagines is the perfect Carol as one reads the book, was also of course in Mingella’s 1999 film of MR RIPLEY – one of her first eye-catching roles. Now she is finally leading CAROL (it was filmed last year, but does not open until this November) into the next award season … no doubt, a cunning Weinstein strategy. 

Alain Delon: "a bit of alright" says Edith ...

We have not done a piece on Alain for a while, but there are lots on him here, as per the label .....

I mentioned before that Engish film magazine "Films and Filming" I used to get, and work for, and have now got all the 1950s issues (it began in Oct 1954 and folded in 1980, as per a forthcoming piece on all that), each issue featured a column on a "Person of Promise" and I have covered some already (Lee Remick, Stephen Boyd, Belinda Lee, James Garner, Carol Lynley, Shirley Eaton, Shirley McLaine etc). Their May 1959 issue (one of the rare ones I got just now) features that interesting young French actor Alain Delon, then making a name for himself. Its rather delicious:

Alain Delon is 23. Edith Piaf, the nightclub entertainer, described him recently with these words: "Une belle petite eule", which roughly translated means "He's a bit of alright". From the colloquial to the rather more sublime comes this quote on young M. Delon from the actor Bernard Blier: "He has balance, a calm and wholesome insolence, respect for professional tradition, scorn for upstart authority and a taste for a violent, short, intense life".  (Well, they were wrong on that count, Delon is 80 this November) .

All of which goes to show that French Cinema has a virile youngster who appeals to women and men alike, to the professional artist and the audience who have come to watch him.

Alain is at pains to assure those who want to pigeon-hole him into a convenient type that he is not, and has no intention of becoming, the "French James Dean". Whether he likes it or not Alain has the same appeal that endeared the late Dean to the bosoms of his fans.

Born in a suburb of Paris, Alain showed little interest in a career in show business during his teens. At 17 he enlisted in the forces and was sent to Indo-China to fight in the sweltering jungle in the war against the rebels. After two years of this murderous campaign he was released. 

It was at this time that Yves Allegret was looking for a young actor to play in QUAND LA FEMME S'EN MELE (When a Woman Interferes). Yves passed the news along to his director brother Marc who starred the actor in his second film SOIS BELLE ET TAIS TOI (Blonde for Danger) opposite Henri Vidal and Mylene Demongeot. At this time he was offered work in the USA but declined. His first starring role came with CHRISTINE opposite Romy Schneider. He also appeared in FAIBLES FEMMES (WOMEN ARE WEAK) in 1959, with Demongeot and two new young actresses Jacqueline Sassard and Francoise Pascal. In FAIBLES FEMMES Delon plays a Don Juan who seduces three girls in turn and they plot their revenge ... 

His hobbies are horse-racing and .... sports cars. Is M. Delon treading the same path as James Dean? It would seem so. 

FAIBLES FEMMES was one of the first French films I saw, when young in Ireland, and I loved that European glamour and decadence, served up in spades of course in Rene Clement's PLEIN SOLEIL (PURPLE NOON) later that year, from Patricia Highsmith but with a twist, as -per my comments on that. Delon soon became the go-to actor after those prestige films with Visconti (ROCCO, THE LEOPARD) and Antonioni (L'ECLISSE). That great European career followed (Melville's LE SAMURAI, BORSALINO with Belmondo etc) and Delon's playboy life made the headlines too, as well as his various romances, including with Romy. Its always a pleasure seeing him with Claudia, Romy, Monica, Marie Laforet and the others, or playing gangsters with Gabin or Montand (MELODIE EN SOUS SOL, SICILIAN CLAN, CERCLE ROUGE etc.. I must get around to his one with Simone Signoret soon...

It all began when fellow actor Jean-Claude Brialy took him to the Cannes Film Festival in 1957, where among others he met were Hollywood agent Henry Willson, and British photograher John Barrington, who took some interesting shots of the young actor (in bed, left).  He was soon on the cover (first of many) in "Films and Filming's" 1961 French issue, in PLEIN SOLEIL. and of course did some Hollywod films. He seems to have aged quite well and working until recently, as per the commentary on the recent PLEIN SOLEIL Blu-ray.  Above: Delon by Barrington in 1957, right, with Belmondo in recent years.

The Ripleys again: Matt or Alain?

We had to have another look at THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY on television once again, the other day, despite rushing to it when released in 1999 and seen it several times since. It is Anthony Minghella's glossy adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's classic novel and is an engaging, if hollow, thriller in bright Italian sunshine. Minghella though, as per his published screenplay, greatly expands on the novel fleshing out characters, played by Cate Blanchett and Jack Davenport, who are barely mentioned by Highsmith. Cate is rich girl Meredith, while Jack is Ripley's new love - whom he has to get rid of in order to continue his duplicitous new life. 

We note also how Dickie is made more of a heel - getting that local girl pregnant and his indifference when she drowns herself - so presumably we the audience do not feel too bad when he is bumped off - but of course Jude Law is so charismatic here the film drifts once he is not there to tease and taunt Matt Damon's nerdy needy Tom. So its an overlong, drawn out affair as our glamorous people act out Highsmith's chilling tale. Philip Seymour Hoffman scores too in that key small role

What sinks it for me is the trowelled-on Fifties period detail - all those fussy '50s fashions they wear, with hats and gloves. Whereas in Rene Clement's PLEIN SOLEIL, the 1959 original, they were smart casual clothes that would still be fashionable now, they look strikingly modern in fact - and 24 year old Alain Delon, stunnng Marie Laforet and Maurice Ronet as Dickie are all perfectly right. Its a shorter tale, and even with that changed ending, it works better. Delon in that ice blue suit strolling around the market, and Marie Laforet as Marge strumming that guitar surrounded by her Fra Angelico prints, and the tensions of the three of them on the boat, and of course Dickie suddenly realising he is in danger after pushing Tom too far ... all set on the real mediterranean of 1959 as captured by Henri Decae's glowing colours. 

I have written a lot about PLEIN SOLEIL here, see the labels below, It is of course the tale of how New York wannabe Tom Ripley's life changes after he is sent to Italy to haul back errant playboy Dickie Greenleaf. In the 1999 version Matt Damon makes Ripley suitably sinister and needy and Jude Law is at his charismatic best as the wastrel rich boy whom Ripley wants for himself or failing that to be him, taking over his life ...just as Delon and Ronet played it in 1959.
I first saw that version when 14 in 1960, when it opened my eyes to European glamour and beauty. Its a seminal movie for me. as much as 2001, BLOW-UP, or LA NOTTE BRAVA, SANDRA, MODESTY BLAISE, WHATS NEW PUSSYCAT? etc. but THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY is fascinating too.