The Day of the Jackal (film)

On 22 August 1962, an assassination attempt is made on the President, General Charles de Gaulle, by the militant French underground organisation OAS in anger over the French government granting independence to Algeria. As the president's motorcade passes, de Gaulle's unarmoured Citroën DS car is raked with machine-gun fire, but the entire entourage escapes without injury. Within six months, OAS leader Jean Bastien-Thiry and several other members of the plot are captured, and Bastien-Thiry is executed.

The remaining OAS leaders, now hiding in Austria, decide to make another attempt, and hire a professional British assassin, who chooses the code name "Jackal". They order several bank robberies to pay his fee: $500,000. Meanwhile, the Jackal travels to Genoa and commissions a custom-made rifle and fake identity papers. He kills the forger when the man tries to blackmail him. In Paris, he sneaks an impression of the key to a flat that overlooks the Place du 18 juin 1940.

In Rome, where the OAS team have moved, members of the French Action Service kidnap the OAS's chief clerk, Viktor Wolenski. Wolenski dies under interrogation, but not before the agents have extracted some information about the plot, including the word "Jackal". The Interior Minister convenes a secret cabinet meeting of the heads of the French security forces. When asked to provide his best detective, Police Commissioner Berthier recommends his deputy, Claude Lebel. Soon afterwards, Lebel is given special emergency powers to conduct his investigation, which is complicated by de Gaulle's refusal to change his planned public appearances.

Colonel St. Clair, a personal aide to the President and one of the cabinet members, discloses what the government knows to his mistress Denise, who passes this information on to her OAS contact. Meanwhile, Lebel determines that British suspect Charles Calthrop may be travelling under the name Paul Oliver Duggan, who died as a child, and has entered France.

Although he is told that the authorities know about the plot, the Jackal carries on. He seduces the aristocratic Colette de Montpellier. Just before Lebel and his men arrive, the Jackal escapes and drives to Madame de Montpellier's country estate. After sleeping with her again and discovering that the police have talked to her, he strangles de Montpellier. The Jackal then assumes the identity of a bespectacled Danish schoolteacher named Per Lundquist. He drives to the railway station and catches a train for Paris.

After Montpellier's body is discovered and her car recovered at the railway station, Lebel initiates an open manhunt, no longer hindered by secrecy concerns. The Jackal picks up a man at a Turkish bathhouse and is taken to the man's flat. The next day, the Jackal kills his host after the man learns from a television broadcast that Lundquist is wanted for murder.

At a meeting with the Interior Minister's cabinet, Lebel states his belief that the Jackal will attempt to shoot de Gaulle three days later on 25 August, the day commemorating the liberation of Paris during World War II. Later, Lebel plays a recording of a phone call, in which St. Clair's mistress gives information to her OAS contact. St. Clair apologises for his indiscretion and leaves the meeting. Denise returns to St. Clair's apartment to find that he has killed himself and that the police are waiting for her.

On Liberation Day, the Jackal, disguised as an elderly veteran amputee, enters the building he had chosen earlier. He assembles his rifle, hidden disassembled in one of his crutches, and waits at a window in an upper apartment. When Lebel finds out a policeman allowed a man to pass through the cordon, the two race to the building. As de Gaulle presents the first medal, the Jackal shoots, but misses when the tall president suddenly leans down to kiss the recipient on the cheek. Lebel and the policeman burst in. The Jackal shoots the policeman, but Lebel kills him.

The Jackal is buried in an unmarked grave. While searching Charles Calthrop's flat, the police are confronted by its occupier who insists on accompanying them to Scotland Yard. He is later cleared, leading Inspector Thomas to ask, "But if the Jackal wasn't Calthrop, then who the hell was he?"

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.[6] Although the story takes place in 1962 and 1963, the film shows car models whose production began later, for example the Peugeot 504 (built from 1968), Renault 12 (built from 1969), a Fiat 128 (1969), and an orange Volkswagen Bus, around 1973.

Zinnemann wrote that Adrien Cayla-Legrand, the actor who played de Gaulle, was mistaken by several Parisians for the real de Gaulle during filming—though de Gaulle had been dead for two years prior to the film's release. The sequence was filmed during a real parade, leading 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.

The Reading Room at the British Museum Library, where the Jackal reads Le Figaro

Hotel Negresco in Nice where the Jackal learns his mission has been revealed.

The Day of the Jackal was filmed in studios and on location in France, Britain, Italy and Austria.[7] 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.[7] Nevertheless, the opening sequence was not shot in the Élysée courtyard but at the hôtel de Soubise, 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.

During the massive annual 14 July parade down the Champs-Élysées, the company was allowed to film inside the police lines, capturing extraordinary closeup footage of the massing of troops, tanks, and artillery during the final Liberation Day sequence. During the weekend of 15 August, the Paris police cleared a very busy square of all traffic to film additional scenes.[7][8]

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 naivety about finances he waived rights to a small fortune in royalties given the film's enduring success.[9]

The film was the inspiration for the 1997 American remake film The Jackal, featuring Richard Gere, Bruce Willis, Sidney Poitier and Jack Black. The 1997 film is about an assassin nicknamed The Jackal who wants to assassinate a highly significant target, but other than that, it has little in common with the original story. Frederick Forsyth refused to allow his name to be used in connection with it, and director Fred Zinnemann fought with the studio to ensure that the new film did not share the first film's title.

In 1988, the same plot inspired the Malayalam movie August 1.

• The Day of the Jackal on IMDb
• The Day of the Jackal at the TCM Movie Database
• The Day of the Jackal at AllMovie
• The Day of the Jackal at Rotten Tomatoes