Movie Review: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon in Borsalino (1970)

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon on the set of Borsalino.

What happens when you put two of the icons of 1960's French New Wave cinema together in the same movie? You get 1970's Borsalino, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon. Borsalino is a gangster movie, a buddy pic that plays a bit like a French version of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The movie is all about the chemistry and charisma of the two stars. And that's enough to make an entertaining movie when the two stars are Belmondo and Delon.

Belmondo and Delon are well paired. They were two very charismatic men, but they each had a distinctly different appeal. Belmondo's nose had been flattened thanks to his early career as a boxer, and movie producers initially thought he was "too ugly" to be a leading man. But audiences didn't care, as Belmondo brought a sexy physicality to his roles, and a huge amount of charm. Delon, on the other hand, was classically handsome, with a beauty that was almost feminine. Both men had breakout films released in 1960: Belmondo opposite Jean Seberg in Breathless, and Delon in Plein Soliel, known in English-speaking countries as Purple Noon. Throughout the rest of the decade, Belmondo and Delon dominated European cinema, releasing hit after hit. 

As Borsalino begins, we see Delon's character getting out of jail. A lot of Delon's movies start this way. Delon tracks down his girlfriend Lola, who is now with Belmondo's character. It seems superfluous to call the characters that Delon and Belmondo play by their character names, rather than the actors, since we're really watching Delon and Belmondo play variations on their film personas. After a fistfight, Delon and Belmondo join forces to try and conquer the underworld of 1930's Marseilles. 

Borsalino is the first movie of Belmondo's I've seen, and I enjoyed him in it. Belmondo reminded me a bit of Steve McQueen; he has the same kind of rugged charm and masculinity. Belmondo has this extroverted charm that just pours out of him in every scene. I was surprised to see that Belmondo was shorter than Delon. 

Delon is fantastic, of course. Just watch the first few minutes of the movie. Your attention is riveted on Delon, but he's not doing anything. He just commands the screen, very much like Gary Cooper. Speaking of Gary Cooper, Delon said he wanted the movie to have a title that did not need to be translated into different languages—he wanted a title like Vera Cruz, the 1954 western with Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster. So, the movie was titled Borsalino, after the Italian hat maker of the same name, whose hats were popular with gangsters during the era in which the movie is set. It's interesting that Delon mentioned Vera Cruz, since there are some similarities in the casting of the two movies. You have the vibrant, outsized, charismatic performer, Burt Lancaster and Jean-Paul Belmondo, paired with the reserved man of few words, Gary Cooper and Alain Delon. I hadn't thought of Cooper and Delon being similar before, but they both had that presence. They could be watching paint dry, and yet it registers on film, and the audience would be happy to watch them. That's a skill that not every performer has. 

The costumes and period details in Borsalino are wonderful to see. I don't think Belmondo's sideburns are accurate to the 1930's, but who cares. When Delon shows Belmondo his new house/nightclub, Delon asks, "What do you think of it?" Belmondo replies, "It's very opulent." That struck my wife and I as a very funny passive-aggressive non-answer to Delon's query. 

Towards the end of the movie there are some scenes where Delon is wearing a white tuxedo in his new, opulent house/nightclub, and I thought again how perfect Delon would have been as Jay Gatsby. In Manhattan, audiences actually applauded when Delon appeared on screen wearing his white tuxedo. Delon had everything needed to play Gatsby: a stoic, brooding romanticism, and the gangster danger hiding just beneath the surface. People say of Gatsby "He looks like he's killed a man," and Nick Carraway describes Gatsby looking that way during the confrontation at the Plaza Hotel with Tom Buchanan. Alain Delon had that look. Carraway also describes Gatsby's smile as affirming all the best parts of someone. Delon had that kind of smile too. 

Borsalino has great theme music by Claude Bolling, which will no doubt get stuck in your head. It's so perfectly of the time: 1920's and 1930's jazz filtered through a late 1960's sensibility. I was also struck by how many scenes don't have music underscoring them, which surprised me a bit. 

Delon's production company produced Borsalino, and it was directed by Jacques Deray, who had directed Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet, and Jane Birkin in the steamy thriller La Piscine the previous year. Supposedly, Delon and Belmondo had to have the same numbers of closeups in Borsalino. I didn't count the closeups, but I felt like Belmondo had slightly more to do in the movie, since his character has romantic subplots, and Delon's character doesn't. It seems like a bit of a waste to have Alain Delon in a movie and not have a romantic plot for him. Instead, he just goes around looking romantically detached from things and vaguely unhappy. 

After Borsalino was released, Belmondo actually sued Delon because the words "An Alain Delon Production" appeared on screen before Belmondo's name, even though when their names appear on screen in the title credits, Belmondo's appeared in front of Delon's. Sigh, egos can be so fragile. At some point, Belmondo and Delon must have patched up their differences, as they starred together in 1998's Half a Chance. Delon and Belmondo remained friends for the rest of their lives. Both men were 88 years old when they died, Belmondo in 2021 and Delon in 2024. 

As a film, Borsalino is more of an entertainment than a work of art. But it is splendidly entertaining. After I watched Borsalino, I thought how lucky we are that this movie exists. There are a million times in life when things don't work out, when schedules or the stars do not align. Borsalino is a movie where things worked out—when Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon made a movie together at the height of their handsomeness and star power. Borsalino is far from perfect, but I'm very glad it exists.  

Movie Review: Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker in Born to be Blue (2015)

The 2015 film Born to be Blue starred Ethan Hawke as the talented, troubled trumpet player Chet Baker. How do you make another movie about a self-destructive musician with addiction issues? Good question. Born to be Blue changed things up by starting off with Baker playing himself in a biopic, circa 1966. The movie also stars Carmen Ejogo as Jane, an actress who is playing Baker's girlfriend in the biopic. Of course, she ends up falling for Baker off-screen as well. 

Born to be Blue shows Baker's attempt to come back from a brutal assault by drug dealers, who smashed his teeth. Now fitted with dentures, Baker has to learn how to play the trumpet again. Dick Bock visits Baker in the hospital. Bock is the President of Pacific Jazz Records, where Baker made many of his most famous records during the 1950's. He asks Jane if anyone has come to visit or called on the telephone. The answer is no, and he explains to Jane that Baker has ruined every relationship in his life, and he cautions her about remaining in a relationship with Baker.

I appreciated Bock's speech to Jane. I've read a biography of Chet Baker; I've watched the great documentary Let's Get Lost. Chet Baker was a terrible human being. The only redeeming quality Chet Baker possessed was the ability to play the trumpet beautifully. Baker is the perfect poster child for separating the artist from the art. Baker's art was amazing: he created beautiful, haunting music. Yet the person who created this beauty was a dark, twisted soul: a sociopath who was addicted to heroin for the better part of thirty years and only cared about getting high. That such beauty could come out of such a damaged person is a mystery I can't explain. 

Hawke perfectly portrays Baker's odd combination of dopey naivete and cold-blooded calculation. It's an excellent performance, and Hawke has the right look for Baker, whose high cheekbones and angelic face gave him the nickname "the James Dean of jazz." 

To Baker's credit, he was able to make a comeback in the late 1960's. Maybe that was the finest thing he ever did, his shining hour. As the movie shows, Baker was off drugs as he learned the trumpet again. But he was never fully able to kick his heroin addiction, and we know all too well what happens after his successful comeback at Birdland in the movie: two more decades of drugs, nonstop gigging, with death coming from a fall out of an Amsterdam hotel window. 

I enjoyed Born to be Blue, and the excellent performances from Hawke and Ejogo. But my problem with the movie is that the trumpet playing in the movie was performed by Kevin Turcotte, not Chet Baker. I'm not trying to slam Kevin Turcotte; his trumpet playing is great. But Chet Baker had a specific tone and sound, and I knew from hearing five notes in the movie that the trumpet playing wasn't Chet Baker. I don't know if it was simply too expensive for the filmmakers to license Baker's performances, or if Baker's estate didn't allow his recordings to be used. But the impact of the music is lessened because we don't get to hear Chet Baker's playing. So it goes.  

Born to be Blue is still well worth checking out for fans of jazz and Chet Baker. 

Book Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Saint Paul Plays 1911-1914, Edited by Alan Margolies (1978)

F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known for his novels and short stories, but playwriting was a recurring interest of his. When he was a teenager, Fitzgerald wrote four plays over four summers from 1911-1914, from the ages of 14 to 17. At Princeton, Fitzgerald wrote the material for several shows performed by the Triangle Club. (He was always on academic probation, so he wasn't able to perform in any of the Triangle Club shows.) His project just before writing The Great Gatsby was a play called The Vegetable, which was a disaster. When he was at the end of his rope in 1937, Hollywood offered a reprieve—he got a job working as a screenwriter for MGM. Fitzgerald worked for MGM for 18 months and then freelanced as a screenwriter until his death in December 1940. 

His early plays were collected in 1978 and published as F. Scott Fitzgerald's St. Paul Plays, 1911-1914. Fitzgerald would surely blush at the thought of readers perusing his juvenilia, but it's a sign of the long fascination with all things Fitzgerald that these plays were published. As a Fitzgerald scholar who gives tours of the neighborhood in Saint Paul where he grew up and went to school, it was a gap in my knowledge that I had not read these plays until now. I always mention Fitzgerald's plays on my tours, since one of the stops is the former site of Mrs. Backus' School for Girls, where his play The Captured Shadow was performed in 1912. 

The four plays that Fitzgerald wrote over those four summers are The Girl from Lazy J, hardly more than a sketch at just 5 pages long, The Captured Shadow, a sophisticated tale of a gentleman burglar, Coward, set in the South during the Civil War, and Assorted Spirits, Fitzgerald's attempt at a farce. The plays were performed at the end of the summer, with the proceeds being donated to local charities. 

What does one make of these four plays? They are definitely juvenilia, and these plays would never have seen the light of day save for the fact that their author went on to write some of the greatest fiction of the 20th century. There's nothing in these plays that clearly points to Fitzgerald's later brilliance. But that being said, these plays are also fun and easy to read, with the occasional really good line appearing. They are solid work considering the young age of the author. I certainly wasn't turning out hour-long plays that I could convince people to perform in public when I was 16 years old. 

In addition to writing these plays, Fitzgerald also acted in them. It's interesting to see which parts he gave himself. In The Captured Shadow he is the title character, a refined gentleman burglar. I can understand why Fitzgerald wanted to play this role: who wouldn't want to be Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, David Niven in The Pink Panther, or George Clooney in the Ocean's 11 movies? In Coward Fitzgerald is not the leading role, but he gets to play a dashing Confederate raider. In Assorted Spirits, Fitzgerald gave himself more of a character role, as he plays the father of two of the main characters. He's not dashing, but he does get to deliver some witty lines. 

The Captured Shadow is my favorite of the four plays. It's noteworthy because Fitzgerald wrote a short story in 1928, also called "The Captured Shadow," that fictionalized the writing and performing of the play. The short story was one of a series of nine short stories that Fitzgerald wrote about a character named Basil Duke Lee. The stories follow Basil during his adolescence, and if you want to know what teenage F. Scott Fitzgerald was like, read the Basil stories. The stories are humorous, insightful, and full of the navel-gazing solipsism that often typifies the teenage years. 

Coward is fine, but the lines about the Confederate "lost cause" are super cringy now. But it's a reminder of how effective and prevalent the "lost cause" mythology was at the time that a Northern boy growing up in Saint Paul would include it in a play.

Assorted Spirits felt like a step backwards from the suave sophistication of The Captured Shadow. The play is slightly overstuffed with too many character and too many crazy coincidences. Fitzgerald was obviously reading Oscar Wilde, thanks to witty epigrams like this one:

"What is your idea of a brilliant woman? Every widow between thirty-five and forty-five who has no children and doesn't wear glasses." (p.93) 

Assorted Spirits was very successful; it raised $500 over two performances in 1914. That would be $16,900 in 2026 dollars. The amount of money Assorted Spirits raised gives you an idea of what a feather in the cap these plays were for Fitzgerald. Imagine a teenager writing a play today and raising almost $17,000 for charity from just two performances. That's impressive. 

These plays survived because the scripts were kept by Elizabeth Magoffin, a teacher who helped organize and guide the plays for all four summers. Her family donated her copies of the scripts to Princeton University, where they joined Fitzgerald's papers. Magoffin was twenty years old in 1911, just five years older than Scott, and that year she inscribed a photo: "To Scott—'He had that spark-magnetic mark' with the best love of the one who thinks so." That's an interesting inscription to write to a fifteen-year-old boy. Did Elizabeth have feelings for Scott? There's no evidence I'm aware of except for this warm inscription to suggest there was anything romantic between Magoffin and Fitzgerald. But she may have fallen under the magic spell that Fitzgerald seemed to weave wherever he went. Or she may have recognized his talent and realized that he was someone special. Clearly, she thought highly of Fitzgerald to preserve these scripts for so many years. 

Fitzgerald's Saint Paul plays are more for the dedicated scholar than the casual Fitzgerald fan. But they do offer us a fascinating glimpse into this talented writer during his youth, before fame and fortune came calling.