The pace of the jackals

Watched both the original 1973 film, Day of the Jackal, and its 1997 remake, Jackal. The original is much better. Far less blood but far more suspense. Edward Fox's charming sociopath looks even more smart and dangerous by comparison with Bruce Willis' plodding and detached thug. Bad direction, I suspect. Willis changes his appearance more than twice as often as Fox, but that cannot give his character much mystery or appeal.

The original film depicts an attempt on Charles de Gaulle's life in the early 1960's. Especially from the standpoint of 2011, much of the tension generated by the story lies in the cumbersome and primitive information and communication technology of fifty years ago. Technology with which I grew up and was quite familiar. Rotary phones (if you were in a hurry, I remember how long it took for the dial to circle back around for each number), tape recorders, typewriters, records full of paper in stacks of folders, no faxes*. No computers, no internet, no cell phones, no smart chips, no databases. One whole section of the movie requiring a phalanx of white male police detectives in white shirts and ties and cigarettes, working over days, would now be covered by a thirty-second clip of an single vegan Asian woman in leotards working at a keyboard, with a huge wall-sized screen and hookups to all the centers of the action. It really is astonishing how we become defined by our technology...(he says as he blogs.)

The mere three decades between the Cold War world of 1963 and the post Soviet (but still pre 9/11) world of 1996 belies the massive social change as well. (The watershed year 1968, however, was just a short while later.) Jackal I asks for $500K for his career-ending work, for Jackal II, $70 million. Shot in England, France and Italy, Day of the Jackal is full of...actual English, French and Italians. 99% White. The government, military and the police are entirely male. People at airports are all dressed up. France and Italy have borders, with guards. The constant cigarette smoking** and the drinking of hard liquor --things which are now, if I am not mistaken, practically illegal to show on screen-- likewise indicate how much life has changed in one lifetime. In Jackal, we have major characters who are female or Black or Russian, the enemy is the Russian mafia and the good-guy terrorists are IRA and ETA.

I recommend Day of the Jackal. An excellent thriller in every way.

*And even faxes are fading away, I think, in favor of printing a pdf file direct from your computer screen. Nowadays I arrive at the airport dressed very casually, partly because of the Muslim-inspired security procedures. And I already have my boarding pass with me, printed at home. The crowding of the planes is the downside of the fact that air travel is now much cheaper. And I can make all the arrangements from my laptop, without a travel agent --remember those?

**I once worked with a local gay man who was ashamed of his smoking habit. I remarked what a strange world we lived in, that a man who had sex with other men could be open and public about it with little concern, but had to hide his cigarettes for fear of moral censure. Puritanism does not disappear; it simply migrates.