The Day of the Jackal (1973)

Good movie but grossly overrated

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Have read this novel several times during the past 3 decades, and watched this film for several times too at interval during the same period. This is a great film, correctly adapted and realized by the screenplay writer and the director. The only not quite right thing about this film that I have to point out is: It looks too British, almost all of the actors were British, only Superintendent Lebel was a true French. That's why this film didn't feel a bit like what it should be. If the French characters in this film was like what as we read in the novel, they should be played 100% by the French actors. It's an international co-operated operation, the producers and the director should have no problem to use the French to play French, I don't know why he couldn't have done that. The settings in this film were all French, but the cabinet meeting were all British, it just looked unrealistic and funny. The background and the time are when there were no central air-conditioning or window air-condition units, no fax, no cell phone, no internet, no wi-fi hotspots, people were still chain-smoking in windowless offices, no Chinese take-out boxes on the office desk, even no pizza at all. What we got and saw in this film were lot of Citron sedans, Alfa-Romeo 2-seater, phone with rotary dial, or public phone service stations, telephone booth was not available yet. These 70s' scenes are very nostalgic and should be preciously appreciated. The tempo of this film was exactly it should be, and you should not consider it dated. A great film to repeatedly watch time and time before you kick the bucket. : )

Arguably the finest cat-n-mouse thriller ever made. Fred Zinnemann's film of the Frederick Forsyth best-seller is so well put together and so exciting it's nearly hypnotic. Edward Fox is the eponymous assassin, hired to kill French President Charles de Gaulle. Michel Lonsdale is the cop charged with tracking him down and stopping him. Filmed at break-neck speed with excellent acting, great cinematography by Jean Tournier and astounding editing by Ralph Kemplen. Fox & Lonsdale are excellent and the large supporting cast includes Cyril Cusack (in quite the unusual role), Derek Jacobi, Alan Badel and Tony Britton. The always interesting Delphine Seyrig has a very odd cameo. Shot in France, England and Italy.

A police procedural in the guise of a political thriller, "Day of the Jackal" is impressively-detailed but more restrained than many of its peers. Star power and the promise of intense action took its genre cousins "The French Connection" and "Three Days of the Condor," for example, to $40-50 million finishes in 1971 and 1975, respectively, but the slower-boiling "Jackal" barely broke $16 million. In quality of production, "Jackal" excels but seems to hearken back. It has the feel of an early 1960s film (and since it is set in 1963 that is appropriate), with the clothes and the cinematography and even the posh European setting all feeling right for a slick actioner of that era. The plot follows detectives and assassins, the first always half a step behind the second, but there is none of that stuff called "grit" that defines so many crime and espionage movies from the 1970s onward. Everything is in broad daylight, beautifully-shot with the smooth, washed-out look of director Zinnemann's other color productions like "Julia" (1977) and "A Man for All Seasons" (1966), and the necessary violence is handled perfunctorily and virtually bloodlessly. Nobody shouts, the one car crash is an accidental fender-bender, and when a French minister is implicated in an embarrassing security breach in the middle of a briefing he quietly apologizes and excuses himself. Nobody makes a scene. The decision to go with a low-key script is interesting, especially since the audience presumably knows that President Charles de Gaulle was not the victim of assassination and therefore knows from the beginning how the main plot will end. But the strength of a procedural, as opposed to a thriller, is not always in tension but in detail and the depiction of characters, and in these respects Zinnemann is master.

Intelligent thriller(directed by Fred Zinnemann) based on Fredrick Forsythe's novel about professional assassin the Jackal(Edward Fox, quite good) who is hired by enemies of French president Charles De Gaulle to assassinate him, despite being the most closely guarded man in the world.Engrossing thriller shows his careful research of his target, and how he prepares himself and comes up with a "foolproof" plan to kill him, and how, despite the outward appearance of an English gentleman, will still ruthlessly kill anyone who gets in his way, but of course history records a different outcome, which lends the right amount of truth to this examination of the case, even if the Jackal himself remains a mystery.