The Day of the Jackal (film)

The Day of the Jackal is a 1973 political thriller film directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Edward Fox and Michael Lonsdale. Based on the 1971 novel by Frederick Forsyth, the film is about a professional assassin known only as the "Jackal" who is hired to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle in the summer of 1963.
A co-production of the United Kingdom and France, the film stars Edward Fox as the Jackal, with Michael Lonsdale, Derek Jacobi, Terence Alexander, Michel Auclair, Alan Badel, Donald Sinden, Tony Britton, Cyril Cusack, Maurice Denham and Delphine Seyrig. The musical score was composed by Georges Delerue.
The Day of the Jackal received positive reviews and went on to win the BAFTA Award for Best Editing (Ralph Kemplen), five additional BAFTA Award nominations (including Best Film and Best Direction), two Golden Globe Award nominations, and one Oscar nomination. The film grossed $16,056,255 at the North American box office, returning $8,525,000 in rentals to the studio. The British Film Institute ranked it the 74th greatest British film of the 20th century.
A TV adaptation of the novel and film was released in 2024.
In 1962, following the French government's decision to grant independence to Algeria, the militant underground organization OAS plots to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle. Their first attempt on 22 August fails, leaving de Gaulle and his entourage unharmed. Within six months, OAS leader Jean Bastien-Thiry and several members are captured, and Bastien-Thiry is executed.
With their initial plot foiled, the remaining OAS leaders, now hiding in Austria, hatch a new plan. They enlist the services of a British assassin known by the code name "Jackal," a figure already credited with the assassination of Rafael Trujillo. Aware that targeting de Gaulle is extremely risky and demands a final retirement in anonymity, the Jackal insists on a fee of $500,000. To raise the money, the OAS uses their extensive network to execute a series of bank robberies.
Preparing for his mission, the Jackal travels to Genoa where he commissions a custom rifle from a skilled gunsmith and secures fake identity papers from a forger—a man he later kills when the criminal attempts to blackmail him. In Paris, the Jackal duplicates a key to a sixth-floor flat overlooking a historically significant square, setting the stage for the planned assassination. Meanwhile, the OAS has relocated to Rome, although their activities continue to draw the attention of French security forces.
French intelligence makes a breakthrough when they capture the OAS's chief clerk, Viktor Wolenski. Although Wolenski dies during interrogation, he reveals crucial details of the plot, including the term "Jackal." In response, the Interior Minister convenes a secret meeting with top security officials. Police Commissioner Berthier recommends his deputy, Claude Lebel, to lead the investigation, and Lebel is granted special emergency powers despite de Gaulle's insistence on maintaining his public schedule.
Complicating matters further, Colonel St. Clair—de Gaulle's personal military aide and a cabinet member—unknowingly compromises sensitive information when he divulges classified details to his mistress, Denise. Unbeknownst to him, Denise is an OAS agent who passes on the information to her contacts, inadvertently assisting the Jackal. At the same time, Lebel starts to suspect that a British national, Charles Harold Calthrop, who has re-emerged under the alias Paul Oliver Duggan, might be connected to the assassination plot.
Despite learning that his plot is compromised, the Jackal presses forward. While staying in a hotel, he meets and seduces the aristocratic Colette de Montpellier, but he narrowly evades capture as Lebel and his team close in. After surviving a severe vehicular accident, the Jackal flees to Madame de Montpellier's country estate. There, when she reveals that the police have already questioned her, he kills her. Assuming a new identity as a bespectacled Danish schoolteacher named Per Lundquist, he disposes of Duggan's belongings and boards a train back to Paris.
The discovery of Madame de Montpellier's body and the recovery of her car prompt Lebel to launch a public manhunt. The Jackal temporarily hides at an associate's flat, only to kill the man when he inadvertently becomes a liability after witnessing a news report. At a subsequent cabinet meeting, Lebel predicts that the Jackal will try to shoot de Gaulle during the upcoming Liberation Day ceremony, marking the commemoration of Paris's liberation during World War II. Despite Lebel's detailed warnings, political interference leads to his temporary dismissal from the case, though he is later reinstated when his expertise remains indispensable.
On Liberation Day, disguised as an elderly French veteran named André Martin, the Jackal infiltrates a building near the ceremonial area using the previously duplicated key. Concealing his rifle within a crutch, he positions himself for the assassination. As de Gaulle presents a medal, the Jackal fires a shot that narrowly misses when the president unexpectedly leans forward. While reloading for a second attempt, Lebel and his team storm the scene. In the ensuing confrontation, the Jackal kills a policeman before being fatally shot by Lebel. Ultimately, the assassin is interred in an unmarked grave, leaving the true identity behind his many disguises an enduring mystery.
The Day of the Jackal was originally part of a two-picture deal between John Woolf and Fred Zinnemann, the other being an adaptation of the play Abelard and Heloise by Ronald Millar.
Universal Studios initially wanted to cast a major American actor as the Jackal, with Robert Redford and Jack Nicholson flown to Europe to audition. Although Universal favoured Nicholson, Zinnemann ultimately secured a production agreement stipulating that only European actors would be cast. Afterwards, British actors David McCallum, Ian Richardson and Michael York were considered, before Zinnemann cast Edward Fox. Jacqueline Bisset was offered the role of Denise, but had to decline due to scheduling conflicts.
The Day of the Jackal was filmed in studios and on location in France, Britain, Italy and Austria. Zinnemann was able to film in locations usually denied to filmmakers — such as inside the Ministry of the Interior — due in large part to French producer Julien Derode's skill in dealing with authorities. Nevertheless, the opening sequence was not shot in the Élysée Palace courtyard but at the Hôtel de Soubise, the main office of the French National Archives. The two palaces were both built at the beginning of the 18th century, but the Hôtel de Soubise is more accessible and has less security than the Élysée.
To lend a documentary-like authenticity to the final Liberation Day sequence, the film company obtained permission to use hand-held cameras inside police lines at the annual Fourteenth of July Bastille Day military parade down the Champs-Élysées. Viewers of The Day of the Jackal see extraordinary closeup footage of the massing of troops, tanks, and artillery. Since the Liberation Day sequence was filmed during a real parade, it led to confusion; the crowd (many of whom were unaware that a film was being shot) mistook the actors portraying police officers for real officers, and many tried to help them arrest the "suspects" they were apprehending in the crowd. Zinnemann wrote that Adrien Cayla-Legrand, the actor who played de Gaulle, was mistaken by several Parisians for the real de Gaulle — though the former French president had been dead for nearly two years prior to film production.
During the weekend of 15 August 1972, the Paris police cleared a very busy square of all traffic to film additional scenes.
Frederick Forsyth later wrote that for the film contract to buy rights for his novel, he was offered two options: £17,500 plus a small percentage of subsequent film profits, or £20,000 and no royalties. He took £20,000, noting that such a payment was already a massive sum to him, but due to his naïveté about finances, he waived rights to a small fortune in royalties given the film's enduring success.
The film holds a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 33 reviews with an average rating of 8.0/10. The critics consensus reads, "The Day of the Jackal is a meticulously constructed thriller with surprising irreverence and taut direction."
Critics of the period were generally impressed with the film. Among those was Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who gave it his highest rating of four stars:
Ebert concluded: "Zinnemann has mastered every detail ... There are some words you hesitate to use in a review, because they sound so much like advertising copy, but in this case I can truthfully say that the movie is spellbinding." Ebert included the film at No. 7 on his list of the Top 10 films of the year for 1973.
The Time film critic applauded the transition from novel to film:
The review continued, that due to the talents of director Fred Zinnemann, "what might have been just another expensive entertainment becomes, on a technical level, a textbook on reels in the near-forgotten subject of concise moviemaking. In short, as so often happens, a second-rate fiction has been transformed into a first-rate screen entertainment."
A few critics were less effusive. For example, William B. Collins wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer:
In a MacLeans Magazine review, John Hofsess wrote:
Hofsess added that it is "an authentically detailed suspense story with ingenious twists." Other critics used similar language, praising The Day of the Jackal as an intricate and detailed maze, entertaining and never tedious.
Critic Matt Brunson of Film Frenzy appreciated how the film did justice to the novel it was based on:
Likewise, the film critic for The Spectator opined:
As Empire magazine observed, Forsyth's scrupulously researched "pulp thriller" provided "the perfect template for this exhaustive procedural. In many ways, this outstanding piece of filmmaking marks the apotheosis of a certain style of thriller that has since fallen out of fashion—the mind game. [It is] built with the minutiae of a Swiss watch", without blandishments. The linear plot "is made infinitely complex by the portrayal of this empty vessel of a killer by Fox..." An irresistible force is pitted against an immovable object — a conflict facilitated by the script. TV Guide noted, "We watch his [the Jackal's] preparations which are so thorough we wonder how he could possibly fail even as we watch the French police attempt to pick up his trail."
Gannett news service critic Bernard Drew had both compliments and criticisms: "This is not a bad movie, it races by and entertains, after a fashion. It simply is not as good as it should have been. One wonders what Hitchcock or Costa-Gavras would have done with it. They would have cast it differently, cut down on the elaborate detailing, so much of which comes down to nothing, and the huge dramatis personae, and possibly might have made a better movie—more humorous, passionate, and credible—and then again, quite possibly not."
The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa named The Day of the Jackal as one of his 100 favourite films.
The movie grossed $16,056,255 at the box office, earning North American rentals of $8,525,000. Zinnemann was pleasantly surprised by the commercial results, telling an interviewer in 1993: "The idea that excited me was to make a suspense film where everybody knew the end - that de Gaulle was not killed. In spite of knowing the end, would the audience sit still? And it turned out that they did, just as the readers of the book did."
The Day of the Jackal and the resultant Academy Award nomination were career milestones for Kenneth Ross, the Scottish-American screenwriter.