Above: Italian 4-foglio for Purple Noon (René Clément, France, 1960). Artist uncredited.
In April of this year, on the occasion of a retrospective tribute to French movie star Alain Delon at New York’s Film Forum, Anthony Lane wrote an article in the New Yorker titled “Can a Film Star Be Too Good-Looking?” In the article Lane talks of Delon’s limitations as an actor (he was wrong for comedy, for example, and his voice was nothing special) but says “if we watch him greedily, asking for more, it is for a reason so obvious, and so elemental, that stating it plainly seems almost indecent, but here goes. Alain Delon, in his prime, was the most beautiful man in the history of the movies.”
Lane doesn’t really describe Delon’s beauty as much as he examines the concept of beauty with the help of Kant and Stendhal, but the one thing he does focus on is his eyes: those blue eyes that Delon demurred to cover up with brown contact lenses for the role that eventually went to Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Lane talks about William H. Daniels, who photographed Greta Garbo in 21 films, but whose one regret at the end of his life was that he was never able to photograph her in color. Lane adds, “I like to think that, before he died, Daniels might have seen Purple Noon, and the eyes of Alain Delon. Here was a new kind of blue.”
Delon, who died last month aged 88, came of age in the era of illustrated movie posters and lived long past its demise, but from the late ’50s through the late ’70s, he was regularly painted by some of the legendary poster artists, as well as many of the anonymous ones. In his early posters, for the Romy Schneider vehicle Christine (1958) and the aptly titled Be Beautiful But Shut Up (1958), he is pictured in eyes-closed romantic clinches with his female co-stars and is not immediately recognizable as anything other than a blandly handsome leading man.
Above: Detail from the Italian poster for Be Beautiful But Shut Up (Marc Allégret, 1958, France). Artist uncredited.
Above: French and German posters for Christine (Pierre Gaspard-Huit, France, 1958). Artists uncredited.
In the posters for his first lead role (and first big hit), the 1959 comedy Three Murderesses or Women Are Weak, he is even less recognizable as the Delon we know. The US poster went with photographs, but Delon’s face only appears in a tiny inset square next to the titular murderesses with the caption “Alain Delon: Most sensational screen discovery since James Dean.”
Above: details and posters for the French, German, and Spanish posters for Three Murderesses (Michel Boisrond, France, 1959). French illustration by Jean Mascii.
Above: French poster for Way of Youth (Michel Boisrond, France, 1959). Illustration by Guy Gerard Noel.
You’d be hard pressed to recognize the face above, from the poster for Way of Youth (1959), as that of Alain Delon, but Delon really came into his own, both as a movie star, and as an artist’s subject, one year later with Purple Noon (1960). The uncredited artist of the Italian poster at the top of the page captured, for maybe the first time, those baby blues in all their glory. As did the Argentinian poster seen below, though there were still many painters who chose to paint him with his eyes closed or with less-than-azure peepers, even for Purple Noon.
Above: details from the Italian and Argentinian posters for Purple Noon (René Clément, France, 1960). Italian illustration by Averardo Ciriello.
By the early ’60s, Delon was a megastar, and artists knew how to capture his good looks (Manohla Dargis in the New York Times enumerates “the eerie blue eyes, the slash of dark hair, the cheekbones that looked as if they'd been sliced with a knife”) and make him look recognizably Delon, though there are some odd outliers, like the Czech poster for Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers (1960) and some of the posters for the anthology film Spirits of the Dead (1968).
The big change in Delon’s onscreen persona came from the late ’60s onwards, when Delon, typically unsmiling in his painted incarnations, was now rarely portrayed without a gun in his hand.
Above: details from posters for (clockwise from top): Big Guns (Duccio Tessari, Italy, 1973), Icy Breasts (Georges Lautner, France/Italy, 1974), Scorpio (Michael Winner, USA, 1973), and Flic Story (Jacques Deray, France, 1975).
All in all, I’ve chosen 50 posters from 28 films (he acted in over 100), made over a quarter of a century from 1957 to 1982, to illustrate the progression not just of how “the most beautiful man in the history of the movies” looked, but how we, and especially commercial artists, looked at him. Which of them were best up to the challenge of capturing and conveying his rare beauty might depend on which era of Delon you prefer. One of my personal favorites is by the great Roger Soubie for Henri Verneuil’s Any Number Can Win (1963), and though it’s more of a doctored photo than an illustration, I do especially love Éva Kakassy’s Hungarian poster for Jean-Pierre Melville’s Un flic (1972), which is all about those blue eyes.
Above: Italian, Argentinian and French posters for Purple Noon (René Clément, France, 1960). Italian illustration top left by Averardo Ciriello.
Above: French, Czech, Italian, and Spanish posters for Rocco and his Brothers (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1960). Czech poster by Richard Fremund, Spanish poster by Macario Gómez Quibus, a.k.a. “Mac.”
Above: details from the Argentinian and French posters for L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1962). Artists uncredited.
Above: details and posters for the Italian, US (1983 re-release), and French releases of The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1963). Illustrations by Angelo Cessalon, Jean Mascii, and Gonzalez.
Above: French grande for Any Number Can Win (Henri Verneuil, France, 1963). Illustration by Roger Soubie.
Above: Australian poster for Joy House (René Clément, France, 1964). Artist uncredited.
Above: French and Italian posters for Joy House (René Clément, France, 1964). Illustrations by Roger Soubie and Sandro Symeoni.
Above: Australian poster for L'nsoumis, a.k.a. Have I the Right to Kill? (Alain Cavalier, France, 1964). Artist uncredited.
Above: Italian 2-foglio for The Last Adventure (Robert Enrico, Italy, 1967). Illustration by Morini.
Above: Spanish, French, and Italian posters for Le samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1967). Italian posters illustrated by Sandro Symeoni.
Above: details from the Italian, French, and Belgian posters for Spirits of the Dead (Louis Malle, Federico Fellini, and Roger Vadim, France/Italy, 1968). Illustrations by Rodolfo Gasparri and Gilbert Allard.
Above: Italian 2-foglio for The Girl on a Motorcycle, a.k.a. Naked Under Leather (Jack Cardiff, UK, 1968). Artist uncredited.
Above: Italian, Danish, and Australian posters for Farewell, Friend (Jean Herman, France, 1968). Artists uncredited.
Above: Belgian poster for La Piscine (Jacques Deray, France, 1969). Artist uncredited.
Above: UK quad poster for The Sicilian Clan (Henri Verneuil, France, 1969). Artist uncredited.
Above: UK quad for Red Sun (Terence Young, France/Italy, 1971). Artist uncredited.
Above: Argentinian poster for The Widow Couderc (Pierre-Granier Deferre, France, 1971). Artist uncredited.
Above: Hungarian poster for Un flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1972). Design by Éva Kakassy.
Above: Spanish-territories US poster for Mr. Klein (Joseph Losey, France, 1976). Illustration by MCP.
Above: Italian poster for Boomerang (José Giovanni, France/Italy, 1976). Artist uncredited.
Above: Italian poster for Le choc, a.k.a. Il bersaglio (Robin Davis, France, 1982). Illustration by E. Sciotti.
Many thanks to Film/Art Gallery, Posteritati, and Heritage Auctions for the poster images.
Dip into the archive for my posts on the illustrated likenesses of Lauren Bacall, Kirk Douglas, Bruno Ganz, and three of Delon’s occasional co-stars, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Monica Vitti and Claudia Cardinale.