#760: The Day of the Jackal

The Day of the Jackal

 Fred Zinnemann
Initial release: May 16, 1973 (USA)

It's been a weird decade, hasn't it? Ever since that fucking guy came down on his stupid golden escalator to present himself as a savior to the meanest people on Earth, the tenor of politics in America and abroad seems to have taken a darker turn. Assassinations, attempted assassinations, invasions, genocides, coups, and all the rest — in some parts of the world, depressingly normal, sure, but America and the West have been pretty insulated from it for a long time. It's almost as if everyone had forgotten the upheavals of the 1960s. Americans remember the Kennedy assassination of 1963 as officially kickstarting the 1960s as a cultural moment, good (the Great Society reforms, which arguably needed Kennedy to die to happen) and bad (the Vietnam War and the spasm of political violence that started in 1968.) But to France, the 1960s arguably started with the end of the Algerian war and the backlash to it, culminating in a failed assassination attempt on Charles de Gaulle in 1962 by a far-right group called the OAS. While, amazingly, nobody was seriously hurt in the attack, it was a shocking act of political violence from the already quite violent OAS. While it's looked upon as something of a minor incident now, it nevertheless set the tone for the ensuing decade, in France and elsewhere. Fred Zinneman's The Day of the Jackal is a product of that era; filmed in the 1970s (itself a violent era) but about a historical moment a decade prior, it straddles the line between being a classic bonkers 1970s political thriller (horse crank free with purchase) and a work of historical fiction.

The film opens with a recap of the assassination attempt, occurring in August 1962. Its perpetrators are caught, put on trial and executed. One year later, the OAS' leadership, hiding in exile, are still looking for a way to achieve victory. They hire a foreigner, a British chap who identifies himself only as the Jackal, to do the deed. The Jackal cares not a whit for politics; he's a consummate professional, willing to do any job so long as the pay's right. But the French government has noticed that OAS leadership, which they've been keeping an eye on for some time, are acting strange. A well-placed kidnapping and interrogation of a midlevel OAS official reveals the assassination plot; now it comes down to capturing the Jackal before he can complete his mission.

Zinneman was a well-rounded filmmaker whose movies demonstrated incredible range, from film noirs to dramas to political thrillers. With a documentarian's eye and a social realist's sensibilities, Jackal leans heavily on making spectacle out of the mundane, from simple theft to a car accident. The Jackal himself is cool, a sleek figure of professional malice, nameless and sleekly menacing, a living weapon. Opposite him are perfectly ordinary guys, bumbling cops and government officials; the one man who can track him is a dumpy police detective with a thick broom mustache and a love of pigeons. The OAS are ineffectual and sad, run-down neo-fascists who never stopped believing in the French colonial project. You almost want to root for the Jackal — though even if de Gaulle sucked, the OAS certainly weren't better.

1970s political thrillers are fun — informed as they are by the events of the 1960s, they can't help but be a reflection of that decade, with all the madness that came with it. The Day of the Jackal is the quintessential 1970s political thriller, equal parts a spy movie and a police procedural as the French government scrambles to find the Jackal while trying to keep the investigation secret, all while de Gaulle himself insists on going about his day like normal. Edward Fox is fantastic as the titular Jackal, a sort of apolitically evil James Bond with his careful use of a custom rifle he finds clever ways to hide as he travels into and through France. There's moments of levity, but it's nevertheless a thoroughly intense film, a sort of prototypical Catch Me if You Can for the Jet Set age.

Also, Derek Jacobi is in it, which is good enough for me.

-june❤