{"id":2812,"date":"2013-07-08T14:46:53","date_gmt":"2013-07-08T18:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/?p=2812"},"modified":"2014-02-25T14:55:27","modified_gmt":"2014-02-25T19:55:27","slug":"the-day-of-the-jackal-startling-elegant-and-simple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/?p=2812","title":{"rendered":"‘The Day of the Jackal’: Startling, Elegant and Simple"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"'Day<\/a>

That’s right: give away the ending. ‘Day of the Jackal’ Polish language poster.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

Fred Zinnemann’s “The Day of the Jackal” (Warwick Film Productions\/Universal Productions France, 1973) is just about the classiest suspense thriller ever made, and also one of the strangest. It concerns a plot to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle in 1962: we know (or at least we knew in 1973) that de Gaulle was not assassinated, so we know how it ends before it begins. Zinnemann himself wasn’t sure if audiences would sit still for this. The picture was well received, but it failed to find a large audience. It pulled in just over sixteen million dollars — one tenth of the amount earned by that year’s winner of the Best Picture Oscar, “The Sting,” and less than one tenth of 1973’s top-grosser (in every sense of the word), “The Exorcist.”<\/p>\n

Even odder than the oxymoronic concept of a suspense picture built on a foregone conclusion is the moral ambiguity of the story. To be sure, moral ambiguity had long been a staple of film noir, but in those pictures, the ambiguity came from the absence of anyone you could whole-heartedly root for, and from the lack of a clear sense of good and evil. In “Jackal,” good and evil is as clear-cut as in a classic Western, yet you find yourself rooting for the good guys and<\/em> the bad guy. \u00a0“The Day of the Jackal” is like playing chess against yourself: you can’t lose.<\/p>\n

Even as the number of his murders begins to add up, the Jackal is so suave, charming and attractive, you long to see him succeed. Edward Fox, who plays the Jackal, spoke about the acting challenge in a Q&A after a recent screening of the picture:\u00a0\u201cYou\u2019ve got to make a totally immoral man — totally greedy, ruthless, brutal man —, but you\u2019ve got<\/em> to make him likeable. Otherwise the audience don\u2019t want to go and watch him in the film. You know, it\u2019s a funny old theatrical ingredient — you\u2019ve even got to feel quite sorry for him in the end that he missed.\u201d In this and in all other respects, I’d say Fox succeeds completely; I can’t think of another actor who could have come close.<\/p>\n

Another oddity is this: Edward Fox is the possessor of one of the most distinctive and attractive voices in the English speaking world, yet he has very little to say in the picture. But far from being a source of disappointment and frustration, it only makes the Jackal more alluring. Here’s the scene when we meet the Jackal as he is being interviewed by the OAS, a right-wing terrorist organization in the market for a professional assassin. Fox rarely says as much in any other scene. That’s the marvellous Eric Porter as Col. Rodin, the leader of the OAS.<\/p>\n