ALAIN DELON IN THREE MEN TO KILLThree Men to Kill/Trois hommes à abattre -- not-so-vintage Alain DelonAlain Delon is one of the best looking male movie stars in screen history, noted for the cold, elegant perfection of his face, a matinee idol with a French edge of mystery and danger; and he is still handsome and dignified today, in his seventies, as were Cooper and Peck. But Delon made his iconic films in the Sixties and Seventies. Indeed nothing can quite equal the excitement and sun-drenched beauty of
Purple Noon (1960), René Clément's early version of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, in French, and Delon's acknowledged peak moment of ripe gorgeousness. The glamour continued with
Rocco and His Brothers (poverty chic),
L'Eclisse (ennui chic),
The Leopard (aristocracy chic).
But it was Jean-Pierre Melville who, starting with
Le Samouraï, took Delon from a mysterious, dangerous object of beauty and transformed him into an austere film noir hero, a slick hit man, a suave robber. There were also gangster movies like
The Sicilian Clan and (Delon's first film with Jacques Deray, and an international hit)
Borsalino (with Belmondo and Delon). There were to be some others with Melville, and Delon was considered the "definitive" Melville actor, along with Belmondo (of his
Le Doulos). Two more by Melville with Delon were to follow,
Le Cercle Rouge and
Un flic, the last Melville's last film (1972).
Delon is one of those actors who had only a decade when the great roles came hot and heavy, and it may have ended with the death of Melville. But good roles were still to come, notably in Joseph Losey's
Mr. Klein (1976), and the smaller part but inspired casting as the Baron Charlus in Volker Schlöndorff's
Swann in Love. Still, there have been a lot of potboilers.
Jacques deray made seven films with Alain Delon, the first
La piscine (
The Swimming Pool), with Romy Schneider, another bout of Mediterranean sunlight and good looks.
Borsalino followed, a big hit.
Three Men to Kill (
3 hommes à abattre), being shown in a new print, was conceived primarily as a vehicle for Delon. We may see Deray as a sort of less distinctive Melville substitute. "People don't want me other than as they imagine me," declared Alain Delon in an interview granted the press in October 1980. "My new film is a return to this personality, a somewhat solitary hero, on the margin of everything, of men and of society, a kind of wolf plunged into a hostile jungle" (
AlloCiné). In
Three Men to Kill, the actor thus decides to return to his personal myth in playing the character of Michel Gerfaut, a man who, after rescuing an injured driver, becomes the target of killers for whom he has become an embarrassing witness.
Or so they think anyway. The charm of
Three Men is that Gerfaut, a professional gambler with a checkered but financially successful past, is much more on top of things than the inept agents of Emerich, the arms manufacturer whose goons are after him. But this is also a weakness of the film. There isn't much real conflict, and the plot fails to provide suspense. (There is our curiosity about why this guy Gerfaut took to the hospital got shot and why the shooters then turn on him.) There is a flashy car chase through Paris, and a shootout in a gas station ending with Gerfaut's glamorous and powerful Lancia in flames. There is a lovely much younger girlfriend, Béa (the very classy Italian born Dalila Di Lazzaro), whom Gerfaut treats with kindly condescension: she's tucked out of the way when things get dicey); and he has a mother he treats similarly. A trouble with the setup is that Delon's character doesn't really care about anyone, so nobody can get at him. But he lacks the austere mystique of Melville's films. He's just mysteriously adept at defending himself -- so much so that the gangsters assume he's a pro, and want to hire him on their side. Like these adversaries, he's inexplicably willing to kill anybody who gets in his way -- though he's neither a cop nor a crook. Who is he? He's just Alain Delon, playing a cool role in a mediocre film. For some of us that can be enough, though. And
Three Men to Kill was a box office hit in France in its day. The "dangerous" Delon still had the glamour and spark in 1980, if not quite the mystique or the point.
SFFS'S French Cinema Now, November 9, 2014, 1:00 p.m. New Restoration. Shown at the Vogue Theater, San Francisco.
Three Men to Kill/Trois hommes à abattre, 93 mins., released in France 31 Octobert 1980, and in a number of other countries in 1981 and 1982; never released in the US.
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