Monica Vitti & Alain Delon in The Eclipse (1962, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) (via)

Alain Delon in Purple Noon (1960, dir. René Clément), the first film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (via)

“Every mistake in life, Tom thought, had to be met by an attitude, either the right attitude or the wrong one, a constructive or self-destructive attitude. What was tragedy for one man was not for another, if he could assume the right attitude toward it.

Curiously Tom had never felt guilt, never let it seriously trouble him. In this, Tom realized that he was odd. Most people would have experienced insomnia, bad dreams, especially after committing a murder such as that of Dickie Greenleaf, but Tom had not.”

-Patricia Highsmith, The Boy Who Followed Ripley

Alain Delon in Le Samourai (1967, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville) (via)

“I don’t want to situate my heroes in time; I don’t want the action of a film to be recognizable as something that happens in 1968. That’s why in Le Samouraï, for example, the women aren’t wearing miniskirts, while the men are wearing hats—something, unfortunately, that no one does anymore. I’m not interested in realism.

All my films hinge on the fantastic. I’m not a documentarian; a film is first and foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an exact re-creation of it. Transposition is more or less a reflex with me: I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.”

-Jean-Pierre Melville (via)

Edith Piaf & Alain Delon, 1959 

Alain Delon in Le Samourai (1967, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville)

“There is no solitude greater than a samurai’s, unless perhaps it is that of a tiger in the jungle.”