Skip to content

Actor · 1935–2024

Alain Delon

9: briefs
13:00: average
117 min: in total

On film.briefs9

La Piscine

Jacques Deray · 1969

La Piscine (1969), directed by Jacques Deray, follows a couple’s holiday on the French Riviera that unravels when an old lover and his teenage daughter arrive. What begins as languid erotic tension escalates into jealousy, violence, and concealment. With Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet and Jane Birkin, it uses restrained performances, deliberate pacing and Jean-Jacques Tarbès’ cool, sun-drenched cinematography to explore possession, memory and the fragility of control. Not a thriller in the conventional sense, it is a slow-burn study in psychological erosion, anchored by real-life tensions between its stars.

Le Cercle rouge

Jean-Pierre Melville · 1970

Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1970 heist film follows three men — a released convict, an escaped prisoner, and a disgraced marksman — whose paths converge to rob a Paris jeweller. Shot by Henri Decaë and scored sparsely by Éric Demarsan, it sustains tension through restraint: long takes, minimal dialogue, and a thirty-minute heist sequence that prioritises procedure over panic. Its themes — professionalism as ritual, silence as language, fate as convergence — are embedded in structure, not exposition.

Monsieur Klein

Joseph Losey · 1976

Set in occupied Paris in 1942, Monsieur Klein follows art dealer Robert Klein as he is mistaken for a Jewish namesake and drawn into a vortex of suspicion, paperwork, and erasure. Directed by Joseph Losey and starring Alain Delon, it uses Kafkaesque structure and austere craft to explore identity as a fragile, administratively conferred status — culminating not in revelation, but in the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup and deportation to Auschwitz.

One Hundred and One Nights

Agnès Varda · 1995

Agnès Varda’s One Hundred and One Nights (1995) is a French comedy essay-film set over 101 nights at a château belonging to Simon Cinéma, a centenarian film veteran whose fading memory blurs reality and reel. Starring Michel Piccoli and featuring cameos from Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, Alain Delon, and others, it weaves scripted scenes with archival clips and playful allusion to celebrate cinema’s first hundred years — not as chronicle, but as collective, tactile memory.

Purple Noon

René Clément · 1960

René Clément’s 1960 crime thriller adapts Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley with surgical precision: Alain Delon’s Tom Ripley murders and assumes the identity of wealthy playboy Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet) during a sun-drenched Italian summer. Shot by Henri Decaë and written by Clément and Paul Gégauff, the film treats identity as forgery, class as costume, and murder as logistics—not morality. Its power lies in restraint, rhythm, and the unnerving ease of its central deception.

Eclipse

Michelangelo Antonioni · 1962

Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1962 film Eclipse follows Vittoria, a young translator in Rome, as she moves through relationships, family, and the city’s modern architecture without ever anchoring herself emotionally or narratively. Shot by Gianni Di Venanzo and scored by Giovanni Fusco, it is the final part of Antonioni’s existential trilogy, notable for its radical ellipses, its unbending pace, and its famously wordless final sequence.

Rocco and His Brothers

Luchino Visconti · 1960

Luchino Visconti’s 1960 epic follows the Parondi family—mother and four sons—as they migrate from rural Lucania to industrial Milan. Their attempts to adapt fracture along lines of class, labour, and desire: Simone turns to boxing and self-destruction, Rocco clings to quiet decency, Ciro embraces union politics, and Luca walks away. Shot by Giuseppe Rotunno in Milan’s housing projects and factories, scored by Nino Rota, and performed with restrained intensity by Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori and Annie Girardot, the film treats disintegration as process, not event.

The Leopard

Luchino Visconti · 1963

Luchino Visconti’s 1963 adaptation of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel follows Sicilian Prince Don Fabrizio Corbera as he observes — without intervening — the slow displacement of aristocracy by a rising bourgeoisie during the Italian unification of 1860. Starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, and Alain Delon, it is a visually sumptuous, deliberately paced drama whose power resides in accumulation, restraint, and the physical texture of decay.

Le Samouraï

Jean-Pierre Melville · 1967

Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a Parisian hitman whose meticulous alibi unravels after witnesses fail to identify him for a killing they saw him commit, forcing him to work out who hired him and who now wants him dead. Jean-Pierre Melville directs with almost no music and long stretches of silence, and the 1967 film's spare, controlled style went on to shape a generation of American and European crime cinema.