the day of the jackal contains a superb scene that seems like a prime candidate to meet the requirements of someone looking for great independent 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 draw 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 film 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 his own situation: deeply interested in moving images, with much experience from childhood in looking at, thinking about, and talking about them, and totally, or nearly totally, inexperienced, or even not much. experience”. second-hand knowledge of how they are made.
wow. Of course he was right. I would like to put an unusual twist on this observation by Agee.
One wonders what Agee would have made of a movie like The 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 deceptions and illusions that the Jackal (played by Edward Fox) creates and weaves throughout the film. . Four of the people the Jackal comes across in the course of his plan 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 he plans to shoot – kills – the counterfeiter for his attempt to blackmail the Jackal, Colette because she is questioned by the police, the gay lover because the man has seen the Jackal, disguised, identified on television, and the landlady because she cannot allow no one observes you inside the building. In other words, the four of them know too much. One way or another the concealment of reality by the Jackal has been penetrated. The fifth person, the weapon maker, 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 in very different circumstances. Movie mysteries exist to entertain; that of the Jackal, to deceive.
A professional movie like this could probably only have been made by a studio veteran of Hollywood’s major players, which is exactly what Fred Zinneman was. (Look, I’m just a casual movie goer with a humble and modest collection and it just happens to contain four or five images of Zinneman, simply by virtue of the fact that he tries to represent various genres of Hollywood movies well.) (We can safely ignore Andrew Sarris’s nonsensical remarks about Zinneman en-bloviation like “At best, his directing is harmless; at worst, he’s downright boring.”)
The weapons maker, “Gozzi”, is fully and completely aware that the Jackal is a murderer and orders a weapon to kill someone. The forger is not, only commenting that the Jackal must “have a big job” in the works. Also, the Jackal emphasizes, in a very threatening and blunt tone, that once the job is done, he wants the forger to forget about everything. However, he doesn’t do any of this with the gunmaker, indicating that he must have a bit more faith in him than the counterfeiter. 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 a totally different material than the one the Jackal had requested, 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 the forger). The same is true of the gay man: the decision to kill him is made without any hesitation. Only the murder of the landlady seems to have been planned in advance. But whatever the situation, the concealment of reality it is of 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 get totally emotionally invested in it (laughing, crying, scared to death) and suddenly you can see the director, the cameraman, the sound guys, 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 movie differently? Of course you would. The necessary concealment of reality that is required for things to proceed properly would have been removed. It’s something to behold, isn’t it?