1973
Edward Fox, Terence Alexander, Michel Auclair, Alan Badel, Tony Britton, Denis Carey, Adrien Cayla-Legrand, Cyril Cusack, Maurice Denham, Vernon Dobtcheff, Jacques François, Olga Georges-Picot, Raymond Gérôme, Barrie Ingham, Derek Jacobi
It is the early 60s in France. The remaining survivors of the aborted French Foreign Legion have made repeated attempts to kill DeGaulle. The result is that he is the most closely guarded man in the world. As a desperate act, they hire The Jackal, the code name for a hired killer who agrees to kill French President De Gaulle for half a million dollars. We watch his preparations which are so thorough we wonder how he could possibly fail even as we watch the French police attempt to pick up his trail. The situation is historically accurate. There were many such attempts and the film closely follows the plot of the book. ------- A British assassin is employed by disgruntled French generals to kill Charles de Gaulle while a dedicated gendarme follows the assassin's trail in this political thriller. The film uses the perspectives of the ultra-professional assassin as he prepares his work and that of the harried but humble French detective as he undercovers the plot. ------- When President De Gaulle decides to grant independence to French Algeria, several of the soldiers, who fought in that campaign, feel that De Gaulle is belittling the lives of the men who died there. So they form a group and make attempts at De Gaulle and fail. When several of their key members are killed or caught and eventually executed, the three top members decide to hire a professional assassin to take out De Gaulle. The man that they chose agrees to do it on the condition that he be alllowed complete autonomy. He also advises them to go into hiding until the job is done. And they do. When the French Security force learns that they have shut themselves off from the rest of world are curious what they are doing. So they abduct their errand boy, and once interrogated all he says is the assassin's code name, "The Jackal", they hypothesize that they have hired an assassin to go after DE Gaulle. Once De Gaulle is informed he refuses to alter his plans and will not allow extra security added. So his ministry decides that they should find the Jackal before he makes his move. They appoint the best detective in France, Claude Lebel to find him. Lebel plan is to contact every police department in the world and see if the Jackal comes from their country and if so to provide him with a description and/or a photo. Now Scotland Yard has a small lead but unfortunately they miss him but they have his passport so assuming that he is out of the country, they try and find the passport that he is using. Now when they think that they have him, he discards the identity that he is using and assumes another one. Can they find him before he gets De Gaulle?
143 minutes (at 23.97 frames per second)
853 MB
DivX 5 - resolution: 640x336