The adventures (and little style secrets) of Alain Delon at Melville – Bobine

(Cover photo credit: Alain Delon on the set of “Samouraï”, 1967 - photo Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)

Paris, 1966. Jean-Pierre Melville already has a long career behind him and is preparing to shoot his 10th film. He is a style fetishist, a cinema madman and an author resolutely apart from General De Gaulle's France.

In his locker room, like a ritual: a Stetson hat, dark glasses and a dozen suits. His filming is known to be grueling: he exhausted the tough Lino Ventura on his previous film, and made Jean-Paul Belmondo zany on “L'Ainé des Ferchaux”, who left by slamming the door.

At 31, Alain Delon is a style icon and the French star of European cinema. He has already filmed part of his great cinematographic work with René Clément (“Plein Soleil”), Luchino Visconti (“Rocco and his brothers”, “The Leopard”) and Michelangelo Antonioni (“The Eclipse”).

The two men meet at the request of Melville, who sees no one other than him to play the character in his new film. It will be “The Samurai”, the opening and first movement of Melville’s most stylized period.

Delon and Melville, it's a story in three films, and it doesn't matter that the actor plays a different character each time: the filmmaker's style is obsessive, almost identical whether you're a policeman or a criminal, and that's it. is precisely what we are going to rediscover.

1967, SOLITUDE AND THE BIRD

The first time we see Jeff Costello on screen, he is lying in semi-darkness on the bed in his apartment. There is a little bird in a cage which sets the tempo and blue swirls which go up in smoke. Melville's world takes on a new form, both very refined and ultra stylized.

“The Samurai” is his second film in color and yet everything tends towards black and white. Alain Delon plays the role of a mute and solitary hitman and his style is a stereotype of film noir from the 40s and 50s: suit and tie, buttoned trench coat, collar pulled up to the ears and felt hat. To convince yourself, take a look at “The Maltese Falcon” (John Huston, 1941), “When the City Sleeps” (John Huston, 1950) or even “The Staircase” (Robert Wise, 1959). ), a film that Melville is said to have seen at least 126 times.

If we look at Jeff Costello a little more closely: well-kept black shoes, impeccably fitted suits (blue or gray), always white shirts ( with a button-down collar ) under a white t-shirt, dark ties and probably silk grenadine, gray fedora, beautiful navy overcoat and most often an iconic beige trench coat. It could be a Burberry (we see a lot of them at Melville).

For my part, if I had to reinvent this outfit, I would probably get the elements of the costume from Husbands moviegoers (other ideas here ) and the trench coat from Grenfell. For the rest you can look at Stetson for the hat, Drake's or Shibumi Firenze for the tie, Howard's for the shirt and in the Jordan bible for the shoes. By the way, if you need inspiration on the trench:

Among the little precious details of our Samurai: white gloves and a Baume & Mercier watch worn on the inside of the wrist, a habit that will run through all of Delon's characters in Melville.

We might as well remind you straight away: this cinema is a story of codes and rituals. There is therefore always a American-style night club , clothes, cars and a pair of guns, men on the border of good and evil and not many women, a mirror to adjust one's style or one's conscience, and looks that say as much as an entire novel from the Série Noire collection.

What is certain is that Delon and Melville reinvent here a powerful style for clothing and a sad weather for the atmosphere, and it is so modern that they will influence all the rainy thrillers to come to the cinema.

1970. THE SECRET LIFE OF FIORELLO, GRIFFOLET AND OPHRENE

Three years have passed. Jeff Costello is dead and Alain Delon is reincarnated as a new and enigmatic character named Corey. Melville widens the original circle of his “Samurai”: he still films the night and solitude but now also the cities and the countryside well beyond the capital.

As for Delon, he is still as impassive as ever, and his gaze seems to have noticeably hardened, as if to underline the weight of the past. Its new incarnation is absolutely fascinating to watch.

If “Le Samouraï” is Jean-Pierre Melville’s most famous film, “Le Cercle Rouge” is his greatest popular success, and incidentally one of my favorite films of all time. Firstly because it shares certain affinities with the cinema of Fritz Lang.

Then because it is Bourvil's last major role in the cinema and he is simply extraordinary as a taciturn commissioner, at least as solitary as the characters he tracks down. Finally and above all because Alain Delon here pushes the style of the previous film to its climax: it is impossible not to fall under the poisonous charm of this man freshly released from prison.

However, nothing has really changed since “Le Samouraï”: we still listen to jazz on the radio or in clubs, life is more and more abstract and the stylistic border between the “good” and the “bad” is so tenuous that it is now permitted to move from one to the other without the slightest scruple and with the same costume.

We first discover Corey in a cell in Marseille: lying on his bed, looking at the camera as in “Rocco and his brothers”, blue V-neck sweater, blue gray shirt, navy pleated pants. He is an immediately attractive character. V-neck sweaters, you can find beautiful ones these days at Husbands or Hircus and for shirts and pants, you can look at Pini Parma or Berg & Berg for example.

On closer inspection, Corey has something even more wild than Jeff Costello: the mustache, the haircut, the general attitude (more scoundrel), the whole always associated with the clothing style of film noir.

In detail: black shoes, suit and tie, beige trench coat and Cartier watch. He's the same man, with something more or less (the spirit of the street) who can possibly recall Gabin without the sound - he's Delon's model actor. For the style, same recommendations as for the previous film. It's definitely the same world.

Apart from this story of hold-up and chase, the routine continues. In the privacy of his apartment on Place Maubert, Bourvil's character refines his gendarme tactics and repeats more or less the same gestures: the bath running in the bathroom, the meal ritual in the kitchen for the cats .

Although he shares his solitary life with three beautiful felines (Fiorello, Griffolet and Ophrène), he only really has eyes for their wilder cousins. Their names are Vogel (Gian Maria Volonte), Jansen (Yves Montand) and Corey (Alain Delon) and their destiny is already sealed. For Alain Delon at Jean-Pierre Melville, and like Kenny from South Park, the curse continues.

1972. VAN GOGH AND THE NEW LIFE

The film “Un Flic” is the final stage in Alain Delon’s metamorphosis in Melville: the change of sides, both moral and stylistic. Forgotten, Jeff Costello is nothing more than a name scribbled on the burnt walls of the Jenner studios and two years have passed since Corey's tragic death in "The Red Circle".

With these two characters, a whole style is disappearing from Melville's cinema. In this new film, Catherine Deneuve is, however, as always superb in Yves Saint Laurent and you will notice that Richard Crenna has not only worn US military costumes in his career (the Colonel in “ Rambo ” is him) .

In the meantime, if Melville's men put on their film noir suits, trench coats and hats for the umpteenth time, something nevertheless seems to have changed. First, Alain Delon takes on the role of a police commissioner named Edouard Coleman. In terms of style, the glasses are tinted rather than black, the cuts of the suits are looser, the lapels wider .

We now see huge knitted ties, Italian heels, mismatched outfits and even blue jeans. For all these style elements that are highly anchored in their era, you will of course find them more easily vintage, in thrift stores .

“Un Flic” also sets sail for real: opening onto the ocean, a new American-style heist story and the sun sinking definitively into the sea. Without knowing it, Jean-Pierre Melville is filming his latest film and it is undoubtedly the most deserted and stylized of all. We sometimes think of Jacques Tati's “Playtime” for the plastic side, but it is still at the museum that Melville's undermined gangsters best tell the story of his cinema, diving into the gaze of a striking self-portrait by Van Gogh.

The look is precisely what will remain of Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's last film, as if freed from all moral and dress codes, the actor drew the contours of a new and totally abstract life where only the look counts.

Melville's latest gift to his iconic actor is pure cinema trickery. Unfortunately Delon is already elsewhere, ready for his new career as the future first cop of French film. For style and cinema, we would have to wait until 1976 to once again tremble in front of the immense “Monsieur Klein” by Joseph Losey.