Screened as part of Toho Cinema’s ongoing 10am series of classic films, The Day Of The Jackal (1973) is an adaption of Frederick Forsyth’s acclaimed novel. Set in 1963, the story traces a fictional attempt to kill the former president of France, Charles de Gaulle.
de Gaulle had made enemies over the independence of Algeria and a real life dissident paramilitary group, the OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrète) made a failed attempt to assassinate him. The Day Of Jackal starts with with failed plot then traces a second, fictional attempt on the president’s life.
The remaining leadership of the OAS recruit a mysterious British contract killer, portrayed with an impressive mix of debonair charm and icy, cruel menace by Edward Fox. At the end of the meeting, the Fox’s character takes the code name “Jackal” and sets about planning the kill
Michael Lonsdale plays deputy commissioner Claude Lebel, whose job it becomes to track down the Jackal, who at the beginning of the investigation is little more than a cypher, a nameless, faceless rumour. He starts contacting fellow police around the world, activating the “old boy’s network” and through a contact at Scotland Yard, starts to piece together the puzzle as the Jackal makes his way into France under a series of assumed identities.
The Day Of The Jackal is a tight, tense and well told story. It was director Fred Zinnemann’s return after the ill-fated production of Man’s Fate and one can see in The Day Of The Jackal all the elements that made Zinnemann such a successful realist director across a number of genres.
And, although The Day Of The Jackal shows its age, in some of the meeting scenes and a few of the deaths, it compensates for this in the way some scenes were shot amongst real life street parades (reminiscent of Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool) and in the bluntly unromantic portrayal of sex (both hetero and homosexual). This is a top class thriller, full of detail and suspense and worthy of a repeat viewing on the big (or any) screen.
