the day of the jackal contains a superb scene that seems like a chosen candidate to meet the requirements of someone looking for great standalone scenes: I mean when the Jackal buys a huge melon at the market, takes it to the woods, paints a smiley face on it, hangs it on a tree and uses it for deGaulle’s head at target practice. I’m going to leave it alone and refrain from commenting. Sometimes, in appreciation, the old adage that less is more applies. So what I’m going to do here is approach this movie in a roundabout and weird way. Allow me this indulgence. I’d like to make a strange analogy between a remark a famous film critic once made about movies in general and a somewhat similar state of affairs created by the Jackal in the movie of the same name.
To this day, James Agee is considered by many to be the gold standard for popular film criticism in America, and I think a good part of the reason is his empathetic identification with the audiences who read his columns as he wrote them. In his inaugural column for The Nation on December 26, 1942 he wrote:
“I suspect that I am, much more than not, in your own situation: deeply interested in moving images, with a great deal of experience from childhood in looking at them, thinking and talking about them, and totally, or almost totally, inexperienced or even not very experience”. second-hand knowledge of how they’re made.
wow. Of course he was right. I’d like to put an unusual twist on this Agee observation.
One wonders what Agee would have made of a movie like Day of the Jackal. that requires at least some willingness on the part of the viewer to recognize a parallel between the kind of ignorance of Agee’s movie references and the kind of delusions and illusions that the Jackal (played by Edward Fox) creates and weaves throughout the film. . Four of the people the Jackal crosses paths with in the course of his plot to kill DeGaulle: the forger, the woman he meets at the hotel, Colette, the man who picks him up at the Turkish bath, and the owner of the building the one who intends to shoot – kills – the forger for his attempt to blackmail the Jackal, Colette because the police are questioning her, the gay lover because the man has seen the Jackal, disguised, identified on television, and the landlady because she cannot allow no one observes him inside the building. In other words, all four know too much. In one way or another the concealment of reality by the Jackal has been penetrated. The fifth person, the weapons manufacturer, is left alone with no explanation. Maybe the Jackal trusts him, or maybe he intends to deal with him after he kills DeGaulle. In any case, concealment of reality. it is the operative theme in the film’s plot as much as it is in James Agee’s commentary, albeit under very different circumstances. The mysteries of cinema exist to entertain; that of the Jackal, to deceive.
A professional film like this could probably only have been made by a studio veteran of Hollywood’s leading actors, which is exactly what Fred Zinneman was. (Look, I’m just a casual moviegoer with a humble and unassuming collection, and it just happens to contain four or five Zinneman images, simply by virtue of the fact that he tries to represent various Hollywood movie genres well.) (We can safely ignore Andrew Sarris’ nonsensical remarks about Zinneman en-bloviation such as “At best, his directing is harmless; at worst, he’s downright boring.”)
The gun maker, “Gozzi”, is fully and completely aware that the Jackal is a murderer and orders a gun to kill someone. The forger isn’t, he just comments that the Jackal must “have a big job” in the works. Also, the Jackal emphasizes, in a very threatening and forceful tone, that once the job is done, he wants the forger to forget everything. However, he doesn’t do any of this with the gunmaker, indicating that he must have a little more faith in him than the forger. Still, the forger doesn’t take the Jackal seriously and tries to sell him the documents he had originally agreed to return for free.
Warning: when the counterfeiter tries to blackmail the Jackal, the Jackal kills him. When the weapon maker reveals that he had to make the weapon out of an entirely different material than the one the Jackal had ordered, hardly a word is said about it. The Jackal’s response is “Where can I practice?” When the Jackal finds out that Colette has been talking to the authorities, he immediately kills her, without hesitation (as she did with the forger). The same goes for the gay man: the decision to kill him is made without hesitation. Only the murder of the landlady seems to have been planned in advance. But whatever the situation, the concealment of reality is of the utmost importance.
What does all this have to do with James Agee? I can hear you scream. Just this: what would it be like to watch a movie where you’re totally emotionally invested (laughing, crying, scared to death) and suddenly you can see the director, the cameraman, the sound technicians, the lighting director and the rest of the crew? crew, as well as the actors, as the movie was being filmed. How would you feel? Would you see the film in another way? Of course you would. The necessary concealment of reality that is required for things to proceed correctly would have been eliminated. It’s something to behold, isn’t it?