just watch it!

Fantastic!

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

France, 1963. A group of disgruntled army officers have banded together and formed an organisation called the OAS. Their aim - to kill President Charles de Gaulle. After several failed attempts and the trial and execution of several of their leaders, the OAS hire an assassin in a final attempt to complete the task. He is The Jackal.Superb thriller - a great adaptation of the Frederick Forsyth novel. Very intriguing and engaging. While the coverage of the Jackal himself is interesting, what rounds it off perfectly is the police angle. We see the investigations, on both sides of the English Channel, the ingenious hypotheses and cross-examination of data and the painstaking grunt work.Director Fred Zinneman also builds the tension well and the conclusion is not at all predictable. Add in a decidedly unglamourous lead detective, Commissioner Lebel, and you have a very plausible, gritty, accurate-feeling movie. No flashy stuff, just a great story, well told.

In thrillers' orthodoxy, the effectiveness of suspense relies on the outcome's unpredictability. If the main character is a killer, there has to be chances for his success, and any slight intuition that he might not accomplish his mission would severely undermine the film's value as a thriller.However, there is no rule without exceptions, and on that level, "The Day of the Jackal", released by Fred Zimmerman in 1973, is a fantastic school-case proving that thrills can be efficiently driven regardless of what they're leading up to. The film, adapted from Frederick Forsyth's best-seller, centers on a professional killer, Edward Fox as 'the Jackal' assigned by the underground army group OAS to assassinate General De Gaulle, on anger for his granting the independence to Algeria, thus betraying his vows to the French Army.And there are reasons why the 'Jackal' demands half-a million dollars for his services besides danger and De Gaulle's difficulty to be 'approached': he's giving them France on a silver plate, he'll never be able to work again and they can use their networks to rob banks and jewelries … not to mention he has to make sure he can escape after the killing. Naturally, all these precautions hardly matter on the long term, we know De Gaulle will live, but it's less in the killing than the way its planning is masterfully and meticulously constructed, Zimmerman displays indeed a level of craftsmanship matching the Jackal's professionalism.'Professionalism" is a key word enhancing "The Day of the Jackal"'s cinematic greatness. The film chronicles with a documentary-like realism all the steps, every single move anticipating the assassination. To obtain a passport, he uses the birth certificate of an Englishman who'd be his age if he didn't die at 2, he then moves to Genoa to order false passports from a forger and a lightweight rifle with telescopic sight and a silencer from a gunsmith. Meanwhile, he spots the apartment in Paris with the best view on Place du 18 Juin 1940, duplicates the key to the upper flat, and steals a passport in London's airport from a Danish tourist.To spice up the plot, the French Secret Services spot the location where the OAS members exiled and their investigation concludes on another plot against the President. They have clues that a fair-haired Englishman visited the place but nothing else. The way their services collaborate with other foreign agencies, mainly Scotland Yard, use registration cards from hotels prove the Jackals's precautions right, he rightfully expected that the cover to be blown (not without the use of torture) … but the thrills come from the whole cat-and-mouse game between European police bureaucracies and one man who single-handedly challenges them all.That's one of the greatest delights provided by "The Day of the Jackal", and Fox' performance is crucial here. He appears like a highly-educated upper-class Englishman who can easily go unnoticed in a summertime France full of tourists, we eagerly follow him in his tour all over Europe (the escapism of "The Day of the Jackal" is another strength worth mentioning) and even when he's told about the French police's progresses (a spy was hired to become the mistress of a French minister), he manages to slip through the net, using his boyish charm to seduce a bourgeois woman or a Danish disguise to seduce a Parisian in a Turkish bathhouse.On the other side, professionalism is also working, and Inspector Raymond Lebel (Michael Lonsdale) is given full power to track and find the 'Jackal' In total secrecy according to De Gaulle's orders, De Gaulle wouldn't change his schedule, let alone the August 25 celebration of the Resistance Day, coincidentally the likeliest time for the assassination. Zimmerman swings back and forth from the Jackal to the Police, from the borders to the hotels, with an advantage in time, the Jackal intelligently exploits. Luck or hazard are never parameters, it's essentially the courage and the nerve of a no-nonsense man who trusts his professionalism.Back to that professionalism thing, there is an interesting sequence in Genoa, where the Jackal takes the rifle from the gunsmith (Cyril Cusack) : the man proves his reliability by not asking questions and remaining all matter-of-factly over the killing-marvel he created. On the other hand, the forger tries to blackmail the Jackal and gets exactly what was coming to him. The parallel between the two attitudes highlights that no matter how 'malevolent' he is, the Jackal has 'ethics' , there is a way you should deal with him and a way not to. Still, he can kill any by-passer on his deadly path, women and even older ones won't be spared.Indeed, no matter who die, De Gaulle remains the man-not-to-be-killed. "The Jackal" still has an interesting body count. Some murders are cold-blooded and particularly brutal but they provide the required two-dimensionality for leading villain. And by that, I don't mean the man lacks depth, but what to expect from a professional killer who's only dedicated to his last mission? He can't show anything but what is shown is enough, and the contrast between his elegance and ruthlessness, as for the Inspector's average appearance but undeniable competence, two opposite at the top of their game, is enough to thrill us.And as a thriller, "The Day of the Jackal" is a heart-pounding combination of suspense, realism with regular outbursts of violence, it's a two-hour and 15 minutes race against the clock that never seems to long. Granted the outcome predictable, it's not in the 'what will happen' but 'how it will'. The editing answers to the 'how' and is curiously the only Oscar-nominated aspect of the film; frankly I would have nominated it for Best Directing and Best Writing as well, one of the greatest thrillers of the 70's

A police procedural in the guise of a political thriller, "Day of the Jackal" is impressively-detailed but more restrained than many of its peers. Star power and the promise of intense action took its genre cousins "The French Connection" and "Three Days of the Condor," for example, to $40-50 million finishes in 1971 and 1975, respectively, but the slower-boiling "Jackal" barely broke $16 million. In quality of production, "Jackal" excels but seems to hearken back. It has the feel of an early 1960s film (and since it is set in 1963 that is appropriate), with the clothes and the cinematography and even the posh European setting all feeling right for a slick actioner of that era. The plot follows detectives and assassins, the first always half a step behind the second, but there is none of that stuff called "grit" that defines so many crime and espionage movies from the 1970s onward. Everything is in broad daylight, beautifully-shot with the smooth, washed-out look of director Zinnemann's other color productions like "Julia" (1977) and "A Man for All Seasons" (1966), and the necessary violence is handled perfunctorily and virtually bloodlessly. Nobody shouts, the one car crash is an accidental fender-bender, and when a French minister is implicated in an embarrassing security breach in the middle of a briefing he quietly apologizes and excuses himself. Nobody makes a scene. The decision to go with a low-key script is interesting, especially since the audience presumably knows that President Charles de Gaulle was not the victim of assassination and therefore knows from the beginning how the main plot will end. But the strength of a procedural, as opposed to a thriller, is not always in tension but in detail and the depiction of characters, and in these respects Zinnemann is master.

One of the most remarkable men of the last century in my humble opinion was Charles DeGaulle of France. When I was eleven years old he came out of retirement and established the Fifth Republic of France which has survived to the present. I remember as a kid and an adolescent some of the tantrums on the international stage he would throw and be a general pain to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson.But later on I read a biography of him and clear as a bell I remember what he said about how he saw his role in World War II. "In me you see the honor of France" was the quote. And I thought about it and by God it was true. True for him more than anyone else I could think of. At a time when his country was conquered, when so many more senior military officials either became outright collaborators with their new masters or just played for time to see which way the wind blew, this man would not yield. He was a junior one star brigadier general and when everyone above him yielded, he did not. He and the Free French who served with him carried the honor of their country. Maybe in our history that could only be claimed about George Washington.So only a man of DeGaulle's stature could have gotten France out of the colonial entanglements of her past. Especially Algeria across the Mediterranean who some viewed as part of France. The disgruntled French who had to leave Algeria, mostly army and colonial officials formed an extremist organization called the OAS and made a few attempts to assassinate DeGaulle. The Day Of The Jackal is a novel version of one of those attempts.As we know Charles DeGaulle gave up the Presidency of the Fifth Republic in 1969 and died a year later. Still Fred Zinnemann with no real box office names in his cast of players made one of the best films of the Seventies and one of the best thrillers of all time. Remarkable when you know what the outcome will be.French Intelligence gets a hold of the plot that a lone contract killer called 'The Jackal' has been hired by the OAS who can no longer trust their own network as it has been so compromised to kill DeGaulle. The killer they hire is Edward Fox, an Englishman who is thorough and meticulous in his preparations and as cold as the climate the penguins live in. When the French pick up on him, he manages to elude them a couple of times. He kills three people in his trip to Paris, necessary for him to complete his mission. Among Fox's dead are a woman he picked up during a hotel stay just so he can get her car as his has been spotted. Another is a gay man whom he picked up in a bathhouse in Paris who gave him shelter and then heard the French police were looking for him. The third was a forger who tried to hold him up for more money.Fox even has a weapon especially designed for him to conceal as he goes across the border. I won't say more, but you have to see the weapon he designs for himself. Alan Badel who plays the French Minister of the Interior assigns his own deputy Michael Lonsdale as the man to track down and apprehend the Jackal, dead or alive. Lonsdale who doesn't appear in the film until about a third of the way through is a tireless and dogged adversary who also has to deal with an informant in his own department as the OAS has planted a woman with one of the senior officials to Badel as a mistress/spy. Playing Lonsdale's assistant in an early role is Derek Jacobi.The Day Of The Jackal is at the top of the list in suspense movies. Alfred Hitchcock could not have fashioned suspense and terror any better than Zinnemann does here. Do not miss this film if it ever broadcast.And this review is dedicated to Charles DeGaulle who carried the honor of his country on his very tall frame.