Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2025

The Day of the Jackal (1973): a case study of the focus on P in a motion picture

  The Day of the Jackal is a 1973 political thriller film based on the novel by Frederick Forsyth of the same name, published just a couple of years earlier. It was directed by Fred Zinnemann, who already had prestigious films such as  High Noon and From Here To Eternity among his credits. The book's plot follows a professional assassin - known simply as "the Jackal" - as he prepares to carry out a contract for killing French President Charles de Gaulle in 1963. The screenplay follows the book pretty closely: it simplified rather than modified the book; it cut some pieces of dialogue; it moved the city where the Jackal's forger and gunsmith are based, from Brussels to Genova; and it eliminated one of the Jackal's fake identities. Other changes are minor.  This film is unique and worthy of analysis, in my opinion, for using mainly P on the audience, with a little bit of  R , and I  as to the structure of the narrative, and very few concessions to other element...