In the aftermath of France allowing Algeria's independence, a group of resentful military veterans hire a professional assassin codenamed "Jackal" to kill President Charles de Gaulle.
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.—John Vogel <[email protected]>
France, 1963. A group of disgruntled army officers have banded together and formed an organisation called the OAS. Their aim - to kill President Charles de Gaulle. After several failed attempts and the trial and execution of several of their leaders, the OAS hire an assassin in a final attempt to complete the task. He is The Jackal.—grantss
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.—Keith Loh <[email protected]>
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?—[email protected]
The film opens with the recreation of an actual event, the assassination attempt on the President of France, Charles De Gaulle, on 22 August 1962, by the militant French underground organization OAS in anger over the French government's decision to give independence to Algeria. The group, led by Jean Bastien-Thiry, raked De Gaulle's car, an unarmored Citroen DS, with machine gun fire in the Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart, but the entire entourage escaped without injury. Within six months, Bastien-Thiry and several other members of the plot were caught and executed.
The remaining OAS leadership decides to make another attempt and hires a professional British assassin who chooses the code name The Jackal (Edward Fox). He demands half a million US dollars for his services, so to raise the Jackal's fee, OAS members rob several banks. Meanwhile, the Jackal commissions a rifle disguised as a crutch and fake identity papers. As a professional, he spares the reliable gunsmith but kills the forger who attempts to blackmail him. In Paris, he sneaks an impression of the key to a flat that overlooks a large square where De Gaulle will make an appearance on Liberation Day.
The French Action Service identify and kidnap the OAS chief clerk, Adjutant Viktor Wolenski (Jean Martin) in Italy. They use torture to extract some elements of the plot, including the word "Jackal", before he dies.
The Interior Minister (Alan Badel) convenes a secret cabinet. When asked to provide his best detective, the police commissioner recommends his own deputy, Claude Lebel (Michael Lonsdale). He will have any resources he needs but must avoid publicity. One of the cabinet members, St. Clair (Barrie Ingham), unsuspectingly discloses the government's knowledge of the plot to his new mistress (Olga Georges-Picot), an OAS plant who immediately passes this information on to her contact.
Lebel uses an old boy network of police agencies in other countries to determine that suspect "Charles Calthrop" may be travelling under the name "Paul Oliver Duggan" and that Duggan has entered France.The Jackal decides to carry on with his plan despite the fact that his code name is known. He meets and seduces Colette De Montpellier (Delphine Seyrig) in a Grasse hotel. Slipping away before Lebel arrives, he steals a Peugeot 404 that collided with his Alfa Romeo Giulietta and drives it to Madame De Montpellier's estate. After sleeping with her again and discovering that the police had talked to her, he strangles her. The Jackal then assumes a new identity as a bespectacled Dane, using a stolen passport. He drives Madame De Montpellier's Renault Caravelle to a station and catches a train for Paris.
Once the Montpellier's servants discover her corpse and her car is recovered at the train station, Lebel is able to abandon his previous secrecy and make an open manhunt for a murderer. However, the Jackal makes it to Paris just in time, and avoids hotels by going to a bathhouse, where he allows himself to be picked up by a man and taken to the man's flat.
At a meeting with the assembled cabinet, Lebel plays the tape of a phone call made from the house of one of the cabinet members. The cabinet hears St. Clair's mistress passing along information about the manhunt to her OAS contact. St. Clair acknowledges that the call was made from his house and leaves in disgrace. Another cabinet member asks Lebel how he knew which phone to tap, to which he replies that he did not, so he tapped them all.
Lebel realizes that the Jackal will most likely attempt to shoot De Gaulle in three days, when the president will make several appearances for Liberation Day.Meanwhile, the Jackal kills the man who picked him up at the bathhouse after a television news flash reveals him to be wanted for murder.
On Liberation Day, the Jackal, disguised as an elderly veteran amputee, shows his forged papers and is allowed through to enter the apartment building he had cased earlier. He takes up a position at the window of the upper apartment. De Gaulle enters the square to present medals to veterans of the Resistance.
Lebel meets the policeman who met the disguised Jackal and becomes alarmed. As De Gaulle presents the first medal, the Jackal shoots but the bullet misses him because at that moment the president leans over to kiss the recipient on the cheek. Lebel and the policeman burst in to the room, the Jackal turns and shoots the policeman, Lebel uses the policeman's sub-machine gun to kill the Jackal as he tries to re-load his rifle.
Back in Britain, the real - and completely unrelated to the case - Charles Calthrop (Edward Hardwicke) walks in on the police in his flat. As the Jackal's coffin is lowered into a grave, the authorities wonder, "But if the Jackal wasn't Calthrop, then who the hell was he?".
