The day of the jackal contains a magnificent scene that looks like a candidate of choice 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 forest, paints a smiley face on it, hangs it up from a tree and uses it for DeGaulle’s head at target practice. I will leave it alone and refrain from commenting. Sometimes, in recognition, the old adage that less is more applies. So what I’m going to do here is approach this movie in an indirect and weird way. Allow me this indulgence. I would like to make a strange analogy between an observation once made by a famous film critic about movies in general and a somewhat similar situation 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 empathic 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, more than anything, in his own situation: deeply interested in moving images, considerably experienced since childhood in seeing, thinking and talking about them, and totally or almost totally, without experience or even much second-hand knowledge. hand on how they are made. “

Woof. Of course he was right. I’d like to put an unusual spin on this observation by Agee.

One wonders what Agee would have done with 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 references in the movies and the kind of deceptions and illusions that the Jackal (played by Edward Fox) creates and weaves throughout. the movie. Four of the people the Jackal crosses paths with 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 landlady from the building in The one he 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, in disguise, identified on television, and the landlady because he has not you can allow no one to see you inside the building. In other words, all four of them know too much. In one way or another the concealment of the reality of the Jackal has been penetrated. The fifth of those people, the weapons manufacturer, is left alone without 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. The mysteries of the cinema exist to entertain; of the Jackal, to deceive.

A professional movie like this could probably only have been made by a Hollywood mainstreamers studio veteran, which is exactly what Fred Zinneman was. (Look, I’m just a casual movie watcher with a humble and modest collection, and it just so happens that it contains four or five images of Zinneman, simply by virtue of the fact that I try to represent various genres of Hollywood movies well.) (We can safely ignore Andrew Sarris’ absurd remarks about Zinneman’s meddling like “At best, his steering is harmless; at worst, it’s downright boring.”)

The weapons manufacturer – “Gozzi” – is fully and fully aware that the Jackal is a murderer, ordering a weapon to kill someone. The forger is not, he only comments that the Jackal must “have a great job” in the works. Also, the Jackal emphasizes, in very threatening and forceful tones, that, once the job is finished, he wants the forger to forget everything. However, he does none of this with the weapons manufacturer, indicating that you must have a little more faith in him than in 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.

Notice: when the forger tries to blackmail the Jackal, the Jackal kills him. When the weapons manufacturer reveals that they had to make the weapon from a totally different material than the one requested by the Jackal, hardly a word is mentioned about it. The Jackal’s answer is “Where can I practice?” When the Jackal finds out that Colette has been talking to the authorities, he kills her immediately, without hesitation (as he did with the forger). It is the same with the gay man: the decision to kill him is made without hesitation. It just seems like the landlady’s murder was 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 got totally emotionally involved, laughing, crying, scared to death, and then you could suddenly see the director, the cameraman, the sound recorders, the lighting director, and the director? rest of the crew, as well as the actors, as the movie was being filmed. How would you feel? Would you see the movie in another way? Of course you would. The necessary concealment of reality that is necessary for things to work properly would have been removed. It’s something to behold, isn’t it?