On 22 August 1962, the militant underground organisation OAS, infuriated by the French government granting independence to Algeria, attempt to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle. The assassination attempt fails, leaving de Gaulle and his entire entourage unharmed. Within six months, OAS leader Jean Bastien-Thiry and several other members are captured and Bastien-Thiry is executed.
The remaining OAS leaders, now hiding in Austria, plan another attempt, and hire a British assassin, who goes by the code name "Jackal", for $500,000. The Jackal travels to Genoa and commissions a custom rifle from a gunsmith, and fake identity papers from a forger, whom the Jackal kills when the man tries blackmailing him. In Paris, the Jackal duplicates a key to a sixth-floor flat overlooking the Place du 18 juin 1940.
The OAS relocate to Rome. The French Action Service kidnap the OAS's chief clerk, Viktor Wolenski. Wolenski dies under interrogation, but not before the agents extract vital information about the plot, including the word "Jackal". The Interior Minister convenes a secret cabinet meeting of the heads of the French security forces. Police Commissioner Berthier recommends his deputy, Claude Lebel, to lead the investigation. Lebel is given special emergency powers, though de Gaulle's refusal to change his planned public appearances complicates matters.
Colonel St. Clair, a personal military aide to de Gaulle and a cabinet member, carelessly discloses classified government information to his mistress, Denise, unaware she is an OAS agent. She passes this on to her contact, which, in turn, aids the Jackal. Meanwhile, Lebel determines that British suspect Charles Harold Calthrop (whose name Cha… Cal… suggests chacal, French for jackal) may be travelling under the name Paul Oliver Duggan, who died as a child, and has entered France.
Although the Jackal learns the authorities have uncovered the assassination plot, he decides to proceed. While at a hotel, the Jackal meets and seduces the aristocratic Colette de Montpellier. Warned by his contact, the Jackal leaves just before Lebel and his men arrive. After a nearly fatal vehicular accident, the Jackal steals a car and drives to Madame de Montpellier's country estate to hide out. He kills her after discovering the police have already spoken to her. Using an already stolen passport, the Jackal then assumes the identity of a bespectacled Danish schoolteacher named Per Lundquist. After disposing of Duggan's belongings in a river, he catches a train for Paris.
Madame de Montpellier's body is discovered and her car is recovered at the railway station. Lebel, no longer hindered by secrecy restrictions, launches a public manhunt. The Jackal picks up a gay man at a Turkish bathhouse and stays at the man's flat. The Jackal kills him after the man sees a TV news broadcast that "Lundquist" is wanted for murder of Madame de Montpellier.
At a meeting with the Interior Minister's cabinet, Lebel says he believes the Jackal will attempt to shoot de Gaulle during the commemoration of the liberation of Paris during World War II, scheduled three days hence. Lebel plays a recording of a phone call in which St. Clair's mistress, Denise, is heard providing information to an OAS contact. St. Clair apologises for his indiscretion and immediately leaves. When asked how he knew St. Clair was the source of the leak, Lebel says he wiretapped every cabinet member's phone. Denise returns to St. Clair's apartment and discovers that he has committed suicide and finds the police are waiting for her.
On Liberation Day, the Jackal, disguised as an elderly veteran amputee on crutches, enters a building using the key he had earlier procured. In an upper apartment overlooking the ceremonial area, he assembles the rifle hidden within his crutch and waits by the window. When Lebel discovers that a policeman allowed a disabled man to pass through the security cordon, the two race to the building. As de Gaulle presents the first medal, the Jackal takes aim but as he shoots he narrowly misses when the president suddenly leans forward. As he reloads the rifle for another shot, Lebel and the policeman burst in. The Jackal shoots the policeman, but Lebel kills him using the officer's submachine gun.
In England, while police are searching Charles Harold Calthrop's flat, the real Calthrop suddenly arrives. He accompanies them to Scotland Yard and is later cleared, leaving the police to wonder about the true identity of the assassin. The movie ends with The Jackal being buried in an unmarked grave, with Lebel as the only witness.
The Day of the Jackal was originally part of a two-picture deal between John Woolf and Fred Zinnemann, the other being an adaptation of the play Abelard and Heloise by Ronald Millar.[7]
Universal Studios initially wanted to cast a major American actor as the Jackal, with Robert Redford and Jack Nicholson flown to Europe to audition. Although Universal favoured Nicholson, Zinnemann ultimately secured a production agreement stipulating that only European actors would be cast. Afterwards, British actors David McCallum, Ian Richardson and Michael York were considered, before Zinnemann cast Edward Fox. Jacqueline Bisset was offered the role of Denise, but had to decline due to scheduling conflicts.[8]
Zinnemann wrote that Adrien Cayla-Legrand, the actor who played de Gaulle, was mistaken by several Parisians for the real de Gaulle during filming—though de Gaulle had been dead for two years prior to the film's release. The sequence was filmed during a real parade, leading to confusion; the crowd (many of whom were unaware that a film was being shot) mistook the actors portraying police officers for real officers, and many tried to help them arrest the "suspects" they were apprehending in the crowd.
The Reading Room at the British Museum Library, where the Jackal reads Le FigaroHotel Negresco in Nice where the Jackal learns his mission has been revealed.
The Day of the Jackal was filmed in studios and on location in France, Britain, Italy and Austria.[9] Zinnemann was able to film in locations usually denied to filmmakers—such as inside the Ministry of the Interior—due in large part to French producer Julien Derode's skill in dealing with authorities.[9] Nevertheless, the opening sequence was not shot in the Élysée courtyard but at the hôtel de Soubise, main office of the French National Archives. The two palaces were both built at the beginning of the 18th century, but the Hôtel de Soubise is more accessible and has less security than the Élysée.
During the massive annual 14 July parade down the Champs-Élysées, the company was allowed to film inside the police lines, capturing extraordinary closeup footage of the massing of troops, tanks, and artillery during the final Liberation Day sequence. During the weekend of 15 August, the Paris police cleared a very busy square of all traffic to film additional scenes.[9][10]
Frederick Forsyth later wrote that for the film contract to buy rights for his novel, he was offered two options: £17,500 plus a small percentage of subsequent film profits, or £20,000 and no royalties. He took £20,000, noting that such a payment was already a massive sum to him, but due to his naivety about finances, he waived rights to a small fortune in royalties given the film's enduring success.[11]
The film received positive reviews, with a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 32 reviews. The consensus summarizes: "The Day of the Jackal is a meticulously constructed thriller with surprising irreverence and taut direction."[12] Among those who praised the film was Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who gave it his highest rating of four stars:
"Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal is one hell of an exciting movie. I wasn’t prepared for how good it really is: it’s not just a suspense classic, but a beautifully executed example of filmmaking. It’s put together like a fine watch. The screenplay meticulously assembles an incredible array of material, and then Zinnemann choreographs it so that the story—complicated as it is—unfolds in almost documentary starkness. The Day of the Jackal is two and a half hours long and seems over in about fifteen minutes."[13]
Ebert concluded: "Zinnemann has mastered every detail... There are some words you hesitate to use in a review, because they sound so much like advertising copy, but in this case I can truthfully say that the movie is spellbinding."[14] Ebert included the film at No. 7 on his list of the Top 10 films of the year for 1973.[15]
The Day of the Jackal and the resultant Academy Award nomination were career milestones for Kenneth Ross, the Scottish-American screenwriter.[upper-alpha 1] Critics were generally favorably impressed with the film.[17] The paternity of the film is somewhat disputed.[upper-alpha 2] The screenplay faithfully adheres to the novel, even as the latter is uncredited in the film. “This is not a bad movie, it races by and entertains, after a fashion. It simply is not as good as it should have been.”[20]
The Time film critic appreciated the transition from novel to film: "The Day of the Jackal makes one appreciate anew the wonderful narrative efficiency of the movies. Frederick Forsyth's bestselling novel—essentially what mystery buffs call a police procedural, but blown up to international proportions—kept losing its basically simple story line in the forest of words. The writer required paragraphs to detail the procedures of an international man hunt, not to mention the procedures of the Jackal himself, a hired gun employed by disaffected French army officers to assassinate Charles de Gaulle. This is the kind of material that a good director can give us in the wink of a panning camera's eye.” Due to the masterful cinema and cutting skills of director Fred Zinnemann "what might have been just another expensive entertainment becomes, on a technical level, a textbook on reels in the near-forgotten subject of concise moviemaking. In short, as so often happens, a second-rate fiction has been transformed into a first-rate screen entertainment."[21] Other critics were less effusive. For example:
“Day Of The Jackal is not a great film, but it’s a damn good one, one of the very few films released this year that is worth all the trouble and expense of going out to the movies. ... give [director Zinnemann] a good yarn and he tells it without any personal intrusions and attention-getting tics. Jackal is an authentically detailed suspense story with ingenious twists. And you may be surprised, for director Fred (High Noon) Zinnemann and adapter Kenneth Ross have made a curiously depersonalized kind of suspense flick of Frederick Forsyth’s best seller. ..." The script highlights in a suspenseful way the conflict between a relentless “killer’s brain” and the stolid and relentless work of detectives on the hunt for an unknown and elusive quarry.[22]
MacLeans Magazine’s critic called it: “.. an authentically detailed suspense story with ingenious twists. “[23] The movie is an intricate and detailed maze, but is entertaining and never tedious.[24][25] The interplay between director and author was favorably noted:
"Author Frederick Forsyth struck gold right out of the gate with his first fictional work, the 1971 international bestseller The Day of the Jackal, and then had the good fortune to watch it transformed into a motion picture that (unlike too many page-to-screen efforts) steadfastly avoided botching the source material. A largely faithful adaptation of Forsyth’s novel, .... Fred Zinnemann, scripter Kenneth Ross, and editor Ralph Kemplen (earning this film’s sole Oscar nomination) all deserve high marks for ratcheting up the tension in a movie whose outcome is never in doubt (after all, de Gaulle died years later at home, at the age of 79)."[25]
"All of this the cinema is properly and effectively equipped to handle. Zinnemann, with the help of an excellent script from Kenneth Ross, has transferred the novel lock, stock, barrel and silencer to the screen. Nothing important has been left out. ..... [The script and the film conveys, the action, conflict, place and denouement. Making it a] “documentary thriller is that it leaves nothing to the imagination.' In other words, for those of you who have read the novel, going to The Day of the Jackal will be curiously like the experience of seeing the same film a second time round or seeing the filmed version of a stage play. For anyone who hasn't read Forsyth's book, the film can be recommended wholeheartedly."[26]
The scrupulously researched “pulp thriller” provided “ the perfect template for this exhaustive procedural. In many ways, this outstanding piece of filmmaking marks the apotheosis of a certain style of thriller that has since fallen out of fashion—the mind game. [It is] “Built with the minutiae of a Swiss watch”, without blandishments. The linear plot “is made infinitely complex by the portrayal of this empty vessel of a killer by Fox. ...” An irresistible force is pitted against an immovable object—a conflict facilitated by the script.[27] There is an intricate story “with a parallel structure that details the Jackal's preparations for the assassination” and the prophylactic efforts of the detectives.[28]
The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited this movie as one of his 100 favorite films.[29]
Box office
The film grossed $16,056,255 at the box office[4] earning North American rentals of $8,525,000.[5] Zinnemann was pleased with the film's reception at the box office, telling an interviewer in 1993: "The idea that excited me was to make a suspense film where everybody knew the end - that de Gaulle was not killed. In spite of knowing the end, would the audience sit still? And it turned out that they did, just as the readers of the book did."[30]
The Jackal (1997) - An American film directed by Michael Caton-Jones, written by Chuck Pfarrer, and starring Bruce Willis, Richard Gere, Sidney Poitier and Diane Venora. Forsyth, Woolf, Zinnemann and Fox opposed the production and filed an injunction to prevent Universal Pictures from using the name of the original novel and film, and it would be marketed as being "inspired by" rather than directly based on Forsyth's novel.[32][33][34][35] The film does not credit Forsyth's novel as source material, and only credits Kenneth Ross with "earlier screenplay."
Brian Russell De Palma is an American film director and screenwriter. With a career spanning over 50 years, he is best known for work in the suspense, crime and psychological thriller genres. His films include mainstream box office hits such as Carrie (1976), Dressed to Kill (1980), Scarface (1983), The Untouchables (1987), and Mission: Impossible (1996), as well as cult favorites such as Sisters (1972), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Blow Out (1981), Body Double (1984), Casualties of War (1989), and Carlito's Way (1993).
The Organisation armée secrète was a far-right French dissident paramilitary and terrorist organisation during the Algerian War. The OAS carried out terrorist attacks, including bombings and assassinations, in an attempt to prevent Algeria's independence from French colonial rule. Its motto was L’Algérie est française et le restera.
Alfred Zinnemann was an Austrian-American film director and producer. He won four Academy Awards for directing and producing films in various genres, including thrillers, westerns, film noir and play adaptations. He began his career in Europe before emigrating to the US, where he specialized in shorts before making 25 feature films during his 50-year career.
The Parallax View is a 1974 American political thriller film starring Warren Beatty, with Hume Cronyn, William Daniels and Paula Prentiss in support. Produced and directed by Alan J. Pakula, its screenplay is by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr., based on the 1970 novel by Loren Singer. The story concerns a reporter's investigation into a secretive organization, the Parallax Corporation, whose business is political assassination.
The Day of the Jackal (1971) is a political thriller novel by English author Frederick Forsyth about a professional assassin who is contracted by the OAS, a French dissident paramilitary organisation, to kill Charles de Gaulle, the President of France.
Frederick McCarthy Forsyth is an English novelist and journalist. He is best known for thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, The Dogs of War, The Devil's Alternative, The Fist of God, Icon, The Veteran, Avenger, The Afghan, The Cobra and The Kill List. Forsyth's works frequently appear on best-sellers lists and more than a dozen of his titles have been adapted to film. By 2006, he had sold more than 70 million books in more than 30 languages.
Red Rabbit is a spy thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and released on August 5, 2002. The plot occurs a few months after the events of Patriot Games (1987), and incorporates the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. Main character Jack Ryan, now an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, takes part in the extraction of a Soviet defector who knows of a KGB plot to kill the pontiff. The book debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Edward Charles Morice Fox is an English actor and a member of the Fox family.
Tulle is a commune in central France. It is the third-largest town in the former region of Limousin and is the capital of the department of Corrèze, in the region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Tulle is also the episcopal see of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulle.
Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry was a French Air Force lieutenant colonel, military air-weaponry engineer and the creator of the Nord SS.10/SS.11 missiles. Bastien-Thiry attempted to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle on 22 August 1962 in retaliation for de Gaulle's decision to accept Algerian independence. Bastien-Thiry was the last person to be executed by firing squad in France.
Kowalski is the second most common surname in Poland. Kowalski surname is derived from the word kowal, meaning "[black]smith".
The Jackal is a 1997 American action thriller film directed by Michael Caton-Jones, and starring Bruce Willis, Richard Gere, and Sidney Poitier in his final theatrically released film role. The film involves the hunt for a paid assassin. It is a loose take on the 1973 film The Day of the Jackal, which starred Edward Fox, and was based on the 1971 novel of the same name by Frederick Forsyth. Although the film earned mostly negative reviews from critics, it was a commercial success and grossed $159.3 million worldwide against a $60 million budget.
Jackal is a small animal in the wolf/dog family of mammals.
Psychological thriller is a genre combining the thriller and psychological fiction genres. It is commonly used to describe literature or films that deal with psychological narratives in a thriller or thrilling setting.
The Jackal is a fictional character, the principal antagonist of the novel The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. He is an assassin who is contracted by the OAS French terrorist group of the early 1960s to kill Charles de Gaulle, then President of France. The book was published on 7 June 1971, in the year following de Gaulle's death, and became an instant bestseller. In the 1973 original film adaptation, he is portrayed by Edward Fox. A revised version of the character was portrayed by Bruce Willis in the 1997 remake adaptation of the original film, having a divergent storyline and set in the U.S., with a fictional First Lady of the United States as the target of the assassination.
The Seventh Cross is a 1944 American drama film, set in Nazi Germany, starring Spencer Tracy as a prisoner who escaped from a concentration camp. The story chronicles how he interacts with ordinary Germans, and gradually sheds his cynical view of humanity.
A political thriller is a thriller that is set against the backdrop of a political power struggle, high stakes and suspense is the core of the story. The genre often forces the audiences to consider and understand the importance of politics. The stakes in these stories are immense, and the fate of a country is often in the hands of one individual. Political corruption, organized crime, terrorism, and warfare are common themes.
Ralph Kemplen was a British film editor with more than fifty film credits between 1933 and 1982. Kemplen had a long collaboration with director John Huston (1906-1987) on six films between 1951 and 1966. Kemplen also directed one feature film, The Spaniard's Curse (1958).
Wrath of the Lion is a 1964 thriller novel by Jack Higgins. Like the more famous The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, the background to Higgins' book is the last ditch effort by the OAS, a French dissident paramilitary organisation, to take revenge on Charles de Gaulle, the President of France, for his having granted independence to Algeria and ended French rule there.
↑ "The Jackal Based officially on Kenneth Ross’ screenplay for the late Fred Zinnemann’s fine 1973 film The Day of the Jackal (and, through the absence of any mention in the credits, pointedly not on Frederick Forsyth’s bestselling novel), Chuck Pfarrer’s adaptation ... scores as an involving high-tech thriller that occasionally hits peaks of pulsating excitement." Despite far-reaching plot points, "this exceedingly lavish updating of a well-known novel and film stands as a solidly commercial male-oriented suspenser .... The major asset of the film is that it succeeds in maintaining interest and suspense despite obvious viewer foreknowledge of the outcome."[18][19]
↑ "The Day of the Jackal". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 22 November 2022. The Day of the Jackal is a meticulously constructed thriller with surprising irreverence and taut direction.
↑ McCarthy, Todd (15 November 1997). "The Jackal". Variety. Retrieved 22 November 2022.
↑ Taylor, Paul (26 January 2006). "Review: The Day of the Jackal". Time Out. Retrieved 22 November 2022. Low on documentary conviction and political context, but an intriguing exercise in concealing the obvious
↑ Hofsess, John (1 August 1973). "The greening of the Western". MacLeans Magazine. Retrieved 22 November 2022. Day Of The Jackal is not a great film, but it's a damn good one, one of the very few films released this year that is worth all the trouble and expense of going out to the movies. Zinnemann has a self-effacing directorial style; give him a good yarn and he tells it without any personal intrusions and attention-getting tics.
↑ Pollack, Joe. "The Day of the Jackal". St. Louis Post Dispatch May 27, 1973. p.100. Retrieved 22 November 2022. Kenneth Ross's screenplay [a film adaptation of Forsyth's novel], leads the viewers through a maze of detail work on both sides of the law, yet the performance and the direction never allow the film to become tedious
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