The Day of the Jackal

 Fred Zinneman's The Day of the Jackal (1973) is an abstract theorem of a movie, the diagram for a globe-trotting action thriller with all violence suppressed and it's suspense scrupulously eliminated in favor of a strangely minimalist and remote lucidity.  The film's protagonist, an imperturbably efficient and frigid assassin, acts at the intersection between two utterly ruthless institutions:  the OAS, a terrorist group plotting the assassination of President DeGaulle as a reprisal for concessions made in Algeria, and the French secret service. These two competing forces are portrayed as mirror-images of one another, groups of well-dressed and neatly groomed middle-aged men who view murder, bank robbery, and torture as legitimate means to their ends.  Zinneman's film, about 2 1/2 hours long, is shot like a documentary -- the movie's images have a curiously pale, desaturated quality as if shot on 16 or even 8 millimeter  film-stock, surreptitiously obtained by cameras hidden on street corners, train stations, or airports.  Everything is well-lit, clearly shown, but oddly distanced -- it's as if we're watching some kind of surveillance footage, improvised documentary-style on real locations.  There are many handheld camera sequences, suggesting that the images were somehow made covertly.  Most of the movie consists of pictures of people walking across rooms, entering and leaving buildings, driving, or meeting in solemn conclaves in ornate, official chambers that exude a kind of frosty elegance.  The movie's climax, Liberation Day festivities in Paris, is edited together from what appear to be actual documentary style news reels of the real celebration -- ranks of marching men, police barricades, crowds sweltering in Paris' summer heat.  There is no music, a few snatches of voice-over to establish the plot (it's 1963, I think) -- Zinneman stages no car chases, no explosions, and the climactic shoot-out is about five seconds long.  Sex and murder occur off-screen.  The actors, at least at this distance in time from the movie's premiere, are all, more or less, unknown -- and no one really seems to be acting at all; there are no displays of emotion, no arguments, no showy star-turns and no confrontations.  We know from the outset that Charles DeGaulle was not assassinated and so the outcome is never in doubt. The film's thematic contrast, an implicit comparison between the rather harried, rumpled, and prosaic Label, a civil servant, as it were, assigned to hunting down the assassin, and the eerily disconnected and opaque Jackal doesn't become evident until about an hour has passed. The film seems influenced heavily by Robert Bresson and Jean-Pierre Melville, that is, derives, I think, from various glacially abstract, crime pictures made in France in the sixties, melodramas, as it were, reduced to a series of icy propositions about fate and honor.  In turn, aspects of the film show up in later movies by Stanley Kubrick and, most importantly, David Fincher.  Indeed, the film contrasts in an interesting way with Fincher's The Killer, a movie that picks up where Zinneman's picture concludes -- Fincher shows an ostensibly detached and cold-blooded contract killer scrambling to evade the inevitable outcome of his botched murder attempt; Zinneman shows the contract killer overcoming obstacles and doggedly pursuing his plot to murder DeGaulle in the face of increasingly intense police opposition. Fincher, of course, glamorizes his contract-murderer and presents him as a sort of Nietzschean super-man maudit; Zinneman's movie avoids this strategy and proceeds objectively without implying any philosophical or moral implications in the plot.  Fincher's picture trumpets it's nihilism but, in fact, is rather cloyingly sentimental -- Zinneman doesn't draw any conclusions from his elegantly minimalist mise-en-scene and, therefore, is far more nihilistic than Fincher's movie.  Fincher's assassin says he is a nihilist; Zinneman's Jackal doesn't need to make that declaration -- what we see is enough to persuade us of that proposition.  

The film's strategy is announced in an opening flurry of violence -- several assassins fire tommy-guns at speeding limousine in which DeGaulle is riding.  The narrator tells us that the whole thing, involving the discharge 130 rounds of ammunition, was over in seven seconds.  Zinneman's veristic approach to the material is exactly cognate with the film's coldly precise narration -- the assassination attempt, in fact, occupies no more than seven seconds screen-time.  The leader of the cabal is sentenced to death but remains defiant, saying that no French soldier will raise a gun to shoot him; we see that he's wrong about this when facing a firing squad.  The OAS, a disgruntled corps of French military men who feel that DeGaulle betrayed them by making peace in Algeria, hire a British contract killer -- the man's name is never spoken; he's code-named Jackal.  The first hour or so of the movie documents the Jackal's preparations for the murder -- he gets an ingeniously minimalist collection of stainless steel tubes as gun and silencer custom-built for him and acquires various passports and false travel documents. The Jackal buys a watermelon to calibrate the gun's telescopic sight and kills an accomplice who tries to blackmail him.  (Somehow, he kills these people with a single karate chop to the throat.)  The French counter-terrorism forces kidnap one of the OAS officers, and while torturing him to death, secure a couple of clues as to the Jackal's assignment.  This sets up the film's last ninety minutes:  the Jackal enters France and crosses the Massif Central in a Lamborghini while the counter-terrorist ministers dispatch forces to pursue him.  (One of the ministers has been compromised by his mistress, the girlfriend it seems of the executed conspirator -- she seduces the minister, whose wife is on vacation, moves in with him, and, rather overtly, cajoles him into pillow-talk revealing the counter-terrorism force's strategy, all of which is relayed to the Jackal's handlers.)  It's pretty clear that the homeland security ministers (if you can call them that) are wise to the Jackal's plot and, indeed, almost intercept him at the border.  But the Jackal, who is nothing if not persistent, doggedly proceeds to Paris where he establishes himself in the French equivalent of the Dallas Book Depository, a sniper eyrie above the Liberation Day proceedings from which he intends to fire his kill-shot into DeGaulle's head.  Along the way, the Jackal, who is blandly handsome and, of course, utterly self-confident, seduces a woman who lives in a big manor in the hills, hiding out with her until she becomes inconvenient and has to be murdered.  In Paris, with the cops at his heels, the Jackal casually picks up a man in a Turkish bath and, it is implied, has sex with him in order to hide in his apartment -- it doesn't turn out any better for this guy than the housewife. Throughout the last ninety minutes, the Jackal's improvisations and cunning disguises are contrasted with the efforts of Label, a humble detective on the Paris police force charged with stopping the assassin.  Label, who is the opposite of the Jackal in all ways, works with a collaborator and, literally, exhausts himself.  Just before the climax, he goes home and falls asleep and almost misses the final shoot-out because he can't be awakened from his slumbers; his long-suffering wife has to tickle the soles of his feet to arouse him.  (The duel between Label and the Jackal has a thematic significance, contrasting the nihilistic adventures of the professional killer with the police procedural exploits of the rather humble Label.  If the film has a flaw, it is the movie's insistence on contriving a final direct confrontation between Label and the Jackal, something that seems improbable given the movie's otherwise scrupulously realistic perspective on events.)  The Jackal pretends to be a disabled veteran, uses his steel crutches to conceal his minimalist long gun,. and prepares to shoot DeGaulle.  Label intervenes thwarting the plot.  Throughout the film, the Jackal is reputed to be a Brit named Charles Calthrop ("Cha - Cal -- that is, "Jackal").  As the corpse of the Jackal is unceremoniously deposited into an anonymous grave, we learn that Charles Calthrop had nothing to do with the plot and that the identity of the Jackal will never be known.        

The movie is resolutely humorless.  It zips from point to point and scene to scene, scarcely taking a breath.  Zinneman's most famous film is probably High Noon with Gary Cooper, a similarly detached and rather geometrically designed Western that takes place mostly within the confinement of various box-like rooms and doorways.  In High Noon, Zinneman cuts back and forth between his hero and a ticking clock.  This device is amplified ad absurdum in Day of the Jackal.  I counted about 28 shots of various clocks -- but this is merely formal punctuation; at least until the last ten minutes, there is no "ticking clock" component to the movie's plot and the shots of clock-faces, more expressive than most of the people in the film, are meaningless -- it's like Kubrick's intertitles as to time and date in The Shining, a movie that is about the fact that time doesn't really exist at all.  The Day of the Jackal is a sort of landmark of seventies' film making but has not aged at all -- tact and reticence and clarity don't become obsolescent while, of course, histrionics and operatic action are always, more or less, matters of fashion that come and go.  Most people don't know the film and, because it is so understated, it doesn't really present any memorable scenes or sequences and there is no pithy dialogue -- but it's worth seeing and the movie remains startlingly modern; certain kinds of minimalism will always seem current.