The Day of the Jackal
Fred Zinnemann (1973)
It begins with a scene-setting voiceover in an English accent so clipped and pompous that you wonder for a moment if it’s supposed to be a self-parody. It isn’t but is a sign of what’s to follow. Perhaps the success of A Man For All Seasons left Fred Zinnemann starry-eyed about British actors or perhaps he was much more sensitive to the performances of Americans. It’s hard otherwise to understand how the man who made From Here To Eternity – or High Noon for that matter – could have tolerated what he gets from most of the British cast. It’s the same clumsy doing-a-character routine that mars parts of even something like Lawrence of Arabia – but it’s more relentless here, and more jarring because the Brits are playing the French (or, in a couple of cases, Italians), as well as the English. The effect is weird: the dead, stiff delivery of the lines makes it sound as if the actors think they’re reading a translation. This kind of bad acting – mechanical, self-aware, theatrical in the wrong way – seems to be an occupational hazard of a character’s working in the military or the police or government. Of course The Day of the Jackal, an adaptation (by Kenneth Ross) of Frederick Forsyth’s bestseller, is in many respects plot-driven rather than character-based but the awkward playing is so insistent that it detracts from the superb fluency of Zinnemann’s storytelling and from the absorbing realism of much of the location filming in the picture.
The scene in which the Jackal (Edward Fox) is offered and accepts the job of trying to assassinate De Gaulle on behalf of the OAS (the Organisation de l’armée secrète – a right-wing nationalist-militarist group opposed to Algerian independence) is a good bad example of the stilted rhythms of the acting. There’s never a moment of overlapping dialogue, however heated and fractious the exchanges are supposed to be. From that point onwards, there are a good few sequences which describe the Jackal’s largely solitary planning and preparations in silence and these are fine, if a little monotonous. The picture is very well edited by Ralph Kemplen. (One moment seems wrong, though: Colette de Montpellier (Delphine Seyrig), with whom the Jackal subsequently has an affair, makes her first entrance walking down a flight of stairs. The Jackal reacts to Colette even before her legs come into view.) The climax is the Jackal’s attempt to assassinate De Gaulle in Paris on Liberation Day 1963. The marksman’s lookout point is high up in an apartment block. It’s hard to avoid thinking of what really happened in the Texas Book Depository less than three months later but this long sequence is very well staged and genuinely exciting. I could remember at a distance of thirty-five years (I’d seen the film on its original release but never again until now) the moment when the Jackal shoots and De Gaulle moves his head at that split second. It’s a pity that the very end of the film is so bathetic: as the Jackal’s coffin is lowered into an unmarked grave, a (British) voice on the soundtrack cornily asks, ‘But if the Jackal wasn’t who we thought he was … who the hell was he?’
It’s hard to know what to make of Edward Fox’s performance at this distance in time: his oddly emphatic speech patterns and the timbre of his voice – he speaks in a kind of shouted drawl – became so familiar in the years that followed. This Jackal, dressed in light-coloured shirts and trousers and usually wearing a cravat, is rarely an inconspicuous figure: he walks briskly with a distinctive carriage and almost exaggerated arm movements. Fox is compellingly charmless; he makes you believe in the Jackal’s cold-bloodedness. When Michael Lonsdale arrives on the scene as Lebel, the dogged police commissioner put in charge of tracking down the Jackal, it’s refreshing to see a fully developed characterisation. Lonsdale’s Lebel is physically very convincing: this man seems uncomfortable in his body even before he’s aching from nights on a camp bed in the office. The Jackal’s end is all the more startling because it’s brought about by the clumsy, sleep-deprived Lebel, who suddenly becomes an action hero.
Cyril Cusack is good, as usual, as the elderly gunsmith who supplies the Jackal’s firearm for the attempted assassination. Cusack’s natural eccentricity contrasts effectively with the man’s straightforward craftsmanship. There’s a good exchange between him and Fox when the gunsmith presents the Jackal with his weapon and explains the finer details of how it works; you get a sense of the two men’s mutual professional respect, in particular the Jackal’s contained admiration for the gunsmith and sense of excitement at the gun’s potential. As the French cabinet minister in charge of the police’s pursuit of the Jackal, Alan Badel’s dynamic suavity makes him very watchable. Ronald Pickup’s overdone portrait of an Italian forger, who tries to be too clever with the Jackal and pays the price, is at least more flamboyant and engaging (for a few minutes anyway) than what we get from most of the rest of the cast. But these enjoyable performances are greatly outnumbered by the contributions of (to name a few) Maurice Denham, Edward Hardwicke, Anton Rodgers, Donald Sinden, David Swift and Timothy West. The accent of Tony Britton, as a police inspector, goes on a tour of the British Isles until it settles for the Midlands. And you wonder, when you see Eric Porter playing an OAS man or Derek Jacobi as Lebel’s undistinguished sidekick, what was the point of casting this kind of actor in this kind of role.
12 January 2010