Obituary: Alain Delon: A man and his bird

Alain Delon – this is the name of the invention of a director and studio owner born Jean-Pierre Grumbach. Grumbach said that he was firstly Jewish, secondly Alsatian, thirdly French, fourthly lonely; Jews are lonely anyway. In the Resistance, he had adopted the name of Herman Melville, the greatest American writer alongside Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. The film in which the Jewish-Alsatian-French Melville invented Delon is called “Le samouraï” (The Samurai, 1967) and is about loneliness. The German distributor gave it the silly title “The Ice-Cold Angel.”

Delon was popular because of his extraordinary beauty even before he worked with Melville, even holding leading roles in films by Luchino Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni. But seriously, he is only remembered in this one role, which was to be followed by two more similar ones in Melville (“Four in the Red Circle”, 1970; “Un flic/The Chef”, 1972).

Melville said that you can tell that his films are tragedies because their heroes are dead people from the start, the walking dead. At the beginning of “Le samouraï” we see a high, semi-dark burial chamber with two windows. A birdcage is set up right between the windows and the light from outside falls on it. The pitiful peeping of a bird comes from the cage and we hear cars driving past on wet asphalt. It is only because he lights a cigarette that a previously motionless man on a chaise longue is noticed. The smoke captures a bit of daylight.

A motto from the “Buschido”, the code of the samurai, is displayed: “There is no deeper loneliness than that of the samurai – unless, perhaps, that of the tiger in the jungle.” The quote is fictitious, because the samurai were anything but lonely, but belonged to an extremely strictly ruled feudal order. But as will soon become clear, in this film we are not dealing with a samurai, but with a ronin, i.e. a masterless and disenfranchised fighter who knows and follows the old rituals, but has to fight his way through on his own. Jef Costello, the name of the Ronin in this film, is a contract killer.

Another display gives the date: “Saturday, April 4th, 6 p.m.” Close-up of a bundle of 500 franc notes cut in the middle; an advance, an order. The man, it is Delon, in a suit, white shirt and tie, stubs out the cigarette, stands up and casually brushes the half bills along the bars of the cage. The camera follows him as he hides the advance in the cold fireplace. He buttons his jacket, strokes the back of his neck, puts on his trench coat in front of a mirror, puts on his Borsalino, looks at himself carefully, strokes the brim of his hat a little self-absorbedly and leaves the apartment.

The scene repeats almost identically, not only to record a routine but also to record a farewell. Because at the end, before he goes out the door, Jef looks into the apartment again and at the birdcage. He seems to know he won’t return.

Very similar scenes can be found in “Bob le flambeur” (Three in the Morning, 1956) or in “Army in the Shadow” (1969). Even in this last film, arguably Melville’s best, Lino Ventura looks back into the room before leaving, but Delon was clearly the ideal choice for this iconic moment. Because a contract killer usually has other worries than whether his hat fits properly. You don’t imagine him as a handsome young man, battered by fights, prison and drinking.

Delon’s elegance completed the stylization, but at the same time contradicted the cliché and even added some irony. Melville distilled dozens of American films from the Black Series, but he gave them a touch of refinement everywhere; in this case, by having the killer played not by a native James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart, say from Ventura, but by Delon.

Was this just a film about films, an exercise in style, a nod to Hollywood? Certainly not. When “Le samouraï” came out in Germany, Uwe Nettelbeck wrote (“Die Zeit”, 28/1968) that Jef’s opponents were neither his clients nor the police officers, but rather “the apparatus of capital.” Melville’s characters, whether they were on the side of the state or not, all served this apparatus, even if they thought they were operating it, i.e. controlling it. In this way, the otherwise reassuring “moral gap between good guys and bad guys” is eliminated. The fact that Melville portrayed the police so ruthlessly in all of his films may also reflect his experiences in the Resistance.

After this film, Delon seemed doomed to become a Jef Costello – especially in his old age, when he lived with his animals, withdrawn from the world. He occasionally came out with tirades, for example against “unnatural” gays, and was happy to admit that he had a decades-long friendship with the godfather of French fascism, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Le Pen himself said that he and Delon were “patriots, people who were not indifferent to France, its past and its army.” Whenever he meets the actor, they are in each other’s arms like brothers – not like warm ones, of course.

After Delon died on Sunday at the age of 88, the extreme right in particular paid tribute to him. Marine Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal spoke almost fondly of the man’s “steel look.” He is a “Man with a capital M”; a real guy, added Éric Ciotti, who wanted to put the Gaullists on the side of Le Pen’s party before the elections for the National Assembly. “As an honest patriot and right-winger,” Ciotti continued, Delon “always represented a certain idea of ​​France.” You can guess which one. Amazingly, Alain Delon didn’t just have a bird in the film.