Above: Italian 4-foglio for Purple Noon. Artist uncredited.In April of this year, on the occasion of a retrospective tribute to French movie star Alain Delon at New York’s Film Forum, Anthony Lane wrote an article in the New Yorker titled “Can a Film Star Be Too Good-Looking?” In the article Lane talks of Delon’s limitations as an actor but says “if we watch him greedily, asking for more, it is for a reason so obvious, and so elemental, that stating it plainly seems almost indecent, but here goes. Alain Delon, in his prime, was the most beautiful man in the history of the movies.”Lane doesn’t really describe Delon’s beauty as much as he examines the concept of beauty with the help of Kant and Stendhal, but the one thing he does focus on is his eyes: those blue eyes that Delon demurred to cover...