Day of the Jackal, 1973

The Day of the Jackal was a big 1973 UK-French co-production about a fictional attempt to assassinate Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s. Sort of a combination of James Bond and Dragnet. The movie was a procedural. It goes through the procedures used by the assassin as well as by French security services, and it was a bit of a travelogue. We see the Jackal driving through France in his sports car, catching a train, staying in hotels.

It turns out that the French in the 1960s were worse than Americans. There's an execution, police torture, warrantless wiretaps. Police walk around with submachine guns, members of the armed forced try to murder the president. It would have been a nice place except for all that stuff.

It was set in '63 but they they freely used cars made after that which was probably just as well.

You can be pretty sure that a movie made two years after Charles de Gaulle died of natural causes isn't going to end with him being assassinated ten tears earlier. The director took it as a challenge to hold the audience's attention when they knew full well how the movie would end.

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