The Day of the Jackal

GLISSADE

Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal is a manual on how to be a contract assassin, and in this scenario one hired to get Charles de Gaulle. Adapted from Frederick Forsyth’s novel, it’s got all the class you wished most of the pre-Daniel Craig Bond pictures had; though taking the subject seriously, Zinnemann transforms it to become a scenic fantasy of realism—made fluid by Jean Tournier’s pleasing tourist pans about to reek with plausible skullduggery. And smooth as glass but with much more strength: a sort of docudrama before fashionably coined, the thriller is so well edited by Ralph Kemplen you feel caught in the momentum of a glissade. T D of the J is really about a chameleon killer determined to do the job—even when the assignment is withdrawn after being discovered by the authorities. As Edward Fox super-efficiently plays him, the assassin’s insistence has nothing to do with politics—he’s apolitical as well as amoral—it has to do with proving he can do it. Fox isn’t quite the appealing, sexy little number—the blondish-haired, cracked-tooth aristocratic air is smuggy—but the physicality helps account for the self-challenge to act out as suave macho menace. While right for Zinnemann and adaptor Kenneth Ross not to heap on the psychological underpinnings of the character, or lack of them, absolutely more right is they’ve altered his tallness in the book: often the most lethal killers are the smaller walking amongst us and rarely do we see them as threats. You’ll have to read the book to find out if Cyril Cusack’s gunsmith survives. (The remake Jackal, with Bruce Willis and Richard Gere, has nothing on the original.)

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com