Watch The Day of the Jackal For Free

Good concept, poorly executed.

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Don't listen to the negative reviews

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

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. : )

This Film ranks high in Suspense Movies List. It's too sophisticated to understand by Easy Movie goers. It's shot in France, Italy and England - so, it preserves some charm for this part of Europe for times past and long gone. It is, by the way, pure European thriller with local cast and directed by Austrian Fred Zinnemann (1907–1997) who made score of Films for Hollywood studios. Maybe I won't get credit but it resembles a Hitchcock movie by the intricacy of plot and evolving of drama, narrated in documentary style.The gem of performance is Edward Fox as hired assassin "Jackal". This is anagram for name coming from (Cha)rles (Cal)trop. The Jackal uses forged identity by falsifying birth certificate of dead person (Paul Duggan) and stealing two other passports. He then kills 5-6 people on his way to the Paris Plaza where he misses President De Gaulle by inch and get eliminated by Commissar Lebel (Michael Lonsdale). Two women participate in the Movie - Delphine Seyrig as middle-aged Frenchwoman who is killed after an affair with the Jackal; plus, Olga Georges-Picot as Denise (his link to Algerian terrorists that pay half million dollars for targeting the President). All is based on true story documented by Frederick Forsyth and written as a novel.I proceed to reminiscences of today, which is 40 years from time. Today, my friends, such a Movie is impossible to procure or even protocol. We live in a World where everything is being watched, filmed, listened to, recorded, tracked, entered on databases and put on lists. Targeted are government and private agencies, big business and ordinary fellows, fraudsters and organized crime. The World is daunting array of electronic gear ... This is citation from book on "Total Surveillance", published by Piatkus in 2000 (author is not mentioned for discretion).I ask, subsequently, the following question - should people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden be perceived as villains for publishing secret American documents. After all, their starting point was ECHELON system for intelligence gathering - based on signal interception by radomes (those giant golf balls on Earth landscape). I recede now ...

This film, set primarily in early 1960s Paris, offers a close look at a person who spends his life accepting contracts to kill other people in exchange for large wads of cash. The Jackal is a cold, calculating and very intelligent killer determined to succeed in his mission to whack the president of France, Charles de Gaulle. It does not matter much why this supposedly needs to be done. He agrees to kill on behalf of a fringe group of self-styled patriots who are incensed that Algeria has been granted its independence by the president. (As though it were his to confer!) The question how assassinating the president might alter the French renunciation of Algeria as a territory is not really treated in the film, but one surmises from their quasi-religious fervor that the members of the group somehow think that they can spark some sort of political revolution.The gist of this film is a close-up view of the contract killer in action—including the intricacies of his plan and his amoral (or is that immoral?) modus operandi—and the French police and security forces as they attempt to stop him. It's quite a story, with plenty of suspense and twists and turns, but the best part is the realistic and convincing portrayal of the sociopathic Jackal, who will stop at nothing to complete his contract and receive the second half of the huge amount of cash which awaits him. I regard The Day of the Jackal as one the best films on hit men ever made, right up there with Le Samouraï. Highly recommended!

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.