The Day of the Jackal dir. Fred Zinnemann
Yes, it’s a tad dated in the acting department, but in other ways the long, patient game of The Day of the Jackal is refreshing and exhilarating. It has the city-shifting rhythm of a Bond film, but geography has a heft you don’t often get in contemporary thrillers - distances and locations matter to the plot, and aren’t just there to create a veneer of international pizazz. And while his deadly judo chops can seem a little silly, Edward Fox’s Jackal is gripping, chilling, and darkly charismatic - he seems at time like David Bowie’s sinister double, Ziggy Stardust gone to the dark side, trading in his Fender for an Italian-made sniper rifle (complete with customized exploding bullets!). His assignment might derive from a specific historical moment - defeated French right-wingers seeking vengeance for Charles de Gaulle’s handling of the war in Algeria - but the Jackal also possesses a nihilistic lone wolf quality, pursuing his mission even when its political purposes have disappeared. The film clearly maintains the Jackal as a figure of fascination: you don’t necessarily want him to succeed in his mission, but every scene reveals new reserves of ingenuity and determination, if not necessarily any deeper insight into his character. Here, the Bond parallels again feel apparent - this Englishman has a license to kill, uses sex as a weapon, and deploys a lack of conscience to his advantage.
The Jackal’s nemesis, the unassuming police inspector Lebel (Michael Lonsdale), is equally methodical, if far less flashy (I defy any viewer not to have an Inspector Clouseau flashback at least once during Lebel’s time onscreen -- and to bring the James Bond references full circle, Lonsdale played villain Hugo Drax in the Roger Moore-fronted Moonraker). In a race against time, Lebel relies on deduction, basic policework, and luck to track his man. He and the Jackal create an essential dialectic for the film; the cleverer the Jackal appears, the more you root for the inspector to rise to the occasion. This is a film that makes the viewer root for legitimate intelligence work, and argues for its efficacy; it’s a reminder that once upon a time, the surveillance powers of the state were not nearly so broad, or that they at least took a lot more manpower. Creepier are the depictions of France’s counterintelligence service, which is depicted as engaging in kidnapping, torture, murder, and generally going too far; showing that the government is also capable of evil helps lend the film a certain moral gravity, and elevates it above a simple good police versus evil terrorist narrative.