![]() ![]() The film is wall-to-wall with sudden bursts of violence, many of them committed by the Jackal himself. De Gaulle has, arguably, done his military a great favor by pulling them out of a pointless, unpopular war. ![]() “Whoever does it can never work again.” His insists that his fee of half a million in cash is quite sound: “Considering you expect to get France in return, I’d have thought it a reasonable price.” On the other hand, much as we’d like to sympathize with the Jackal’s dreams of fortune and glory, we also have to take into account that he is, at the end of the day, a killer, and that an assassination of the general will do a lot more harm than good. “You must understand: this is a once-in-a-lifetime job,” he warns Colonel Rodin (Eric Porter) and his OAS cronies. In a sense, we can’t help but like him he’s a charming, fairly uncomplicated man, who seeks to kill de Gaulle not because of any personal feelings he may have about the man (hell, for all we know, he may even like de Gaulle a little), but because-to put it frankly-he wants the money. Watching the movie, we have a mixed response to the character. The Jackal has got to be one of the most interesting antiheroes ever to lead a Hollywood film. We are promised a final showdown between Fox and Lonsdale, and, fortunately, we get one. Audiences who saw Zinnemann’s Spanish Civil War epic Behold A Pale Horse (1964) were disappointed that it didn’t end with Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn duking it out, but no worries: Zinnemann doesn’t make that same mistake here. This is a fun, ongoing process of love/hate feelings towards both men that we share all throughout the picture. When we grow tired of Lebel’s long, slow, calculated process of cracking the case, we find ourselves rooting for the Jackal again. When we’re disgusted with the Jackal’s reprehensible killings, we root for Lebel. By giving us both an appealing hero and an appealing villain, Zinnemann allowed it so that audiences could watch the film with fluctuating sympathies towards both men. Lebel is technically supposed to be the movie’s hero, and the Jackal technically its villain, but both men are equally likable, and I think part of the reason why the movie works so well is because the two characters are perfect foils for one another. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Zinnemann, it seems, was intensely paranoid about the modern Hollywood system after the cancellation of Man’s Fate, which, as he wrote, “marked the end of an era in picture making and the dawn of a new one, when lawyers and accountants began to replace showmen as head of the studios and when a handshake was a handshake no longer." In a strange career move, he must have determined that the best way to sell a complex project like The Day of the Jackal to those lawyers and accountants was to reduce its qualities it was, he claimed, just a simple thriller about a plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, and that was it. Why did he do this? In his 1992 autobiography, A Life in Pictures, he provides some hints as to why. And yet Zinnemann would forever insist that the movie was little more than a simple crowd-pleaser one look at the finished film and it is clear he was underrating his own masterpiece. It should not be taken seriously politically or in any other way, because it’s just a technical exercise in suspense.” Today, The Day of the Jackal is widely regarded as one of the best thrillers of its era: politically-charged, suspenseful to the max, and taken seriously (for a variety of reasons) by a host of devoted fans all around the world. In an interview, he was modest: “ The Day of the Jackal was made purely as entertainment,” he claimed, “and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Not everyone felt that way at the time, least of all Zinnemann himself. The book, published in 1971, was Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, and the movie, released in 1973, is a masterpiece-the greatest film of Zinnemann's career. It seemed like his career had nowhere left to go when, suddenly, straight out of nowhere, an offer from Universal came to direct an adaptation of a spy novel that was about to be a huge best-seller. ![]() His attempt to direct an adaptation of André Malraux’ Man’s Fate for MGM had fallen through, and a court battle with the studio almost pushed him over the edge and into bankruptcy. The truth is he would not get to direct his next film for another seven years. After his exquisite A Man for All Seasons (1966) won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, Fred Zinnemann had every reason to feel like the luckiest director in Hollywood. ![]()
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