Stream On: What if we already know the ending? ‘Day of the Jackal’
‘The Day of the Jackal’ (1973) is still one of the most suspenseful yarns on the big screen.
We do partly know the ending of Fred Zinneman’s 1973 political thriller, in which a professional assassin is hired to kill French president Charles de Gaulle. (He doesn’t succeed.) But the film (and the novel on which it’s based) is a masterpiece of suspense.
/Amazon /Streaming /🍅91%🍿88% /Trailer /1973 /PG
Journalist Frederick Forsyth spent three years in West Africa covering the Nigerian civil war for the BBC and as a freelance. Upon his return to Britain in 1969 his first book, the non-fiction The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend, was published as a paperback by Penguin Books. But the book sold very few copies and the then 31-year-old freelance journalist found himself out of work and “flat broke.” So he decided to try his hand at fiction by writing a political thriller as a “one-off” project to “clear his debts.”
Forsyth employed the same type of research techniques that he had used as an investigative reporter to bring a sense of reality to the novel, a story which he first began to consider writing in 1962–1963 while posted to Paris as a young Reuters foreign correspondent.
Four editors told Forsyth that they felt that the well-known facts of de Gaulle’s life (he wasn’t assassinated, in spite of 30 attempts) negated the suspense of the fictional assassination plot as readers would already know it could not possibly have been successful. After these rejections Forsyth took a different strategy and wrote a short summary of the novel for publishers, noting that the focus was not on the assassination attempt itself, but the technical details and manhunt.
The published book's unexpected success in Britain soon attracted the attention of Viking Press in New York, which quickly acquired the U.S. publication rights for $365,000 (£100,000)—a then very substantial sum for such a work and especially for that of a “flat broke” author. Universal Studios then bought the film rights, and essentially recreated the success of the novel.
—In August 1962, the militant underground organization OAS, infuriated by the French government granting independence to Algeria, attempts to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle. The 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 nameless foreign assassin (Edward Fox, Foyle’s War, as “the Jackal”), for $500,000. The Jackal looks like an unassuming British clerk, but he puts the “pro” in “procedural.”
The film, which is very close to the book, follows the Jackal’s meticulous planning (including valid instructions for assuming another’s identity), the discovery of the plot and the assignment of Deputy Police Commissioner Claude Lebel (Michel Lonsdale, Ronin), the subsequent urgent investigation, and the attempt itself. It seems at times like a documentary: it’s a quiet film (the Jackal even uses a silencer on his custom-built sniper’s rifle) but a tense thriller, expertly done, like Forsyth’s original research.
In his 1973 four-out-of-four-stars review, critic Roger Ebert wrote, “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.”
It’s one of my favorite movies, from one of my favorite books. In 1997 a remake with Bruce Willis and Richard Gere, which I will probably never see, earned mostly negative reviews from critics, but was a commercial success originally. (But in the long run, as on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s a bust.) A TV miniseries adaption is in the works, though, to be released later this year. Now that sounds interesting.
Sources include The Guardian and Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED).
Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.