Alain Delon gives one of the finest performances of his career. A failed poet alienated from his wife (Léa Massari) and his demanding aristocratic family, Delon washes up in the seaside town of Rimini as a substitute high school teacher and seduces one of his students, the fragile and beautiful Sonia Petrovna. Valerio Zurlini was a director of uncommon intelligence and restraint, transforming the Rimini of Fellini’s carnivalesque Amarcord into a purgatory of lost souls. The film’s Italian title, La prima notte di quiete, possibly a Goethe verse that loosely translates as “Death, the first night of peace,” is one of Zurlini’s many thoughtful allusions—to Dante, Stendhal, and Piero della Francesca, among others.