FAQ for
The Day of the Jackal (1973) More at IMDbPro »

No, although the historical background is. The OAS (Organisation de l'armée secrète, or Secret Army Organization) was a French terrorist group formed after President De Gaulle granted independence to Algeria in 1962. It was made up mostly of French Foreign Legionnaires and French citizens of Algeria (pieds noirs). The group engaged in a vicious campaign of terrorism within Algeria itself, attacking Arabs and clashing with the Algerian FLN, before shifting its focus to De Gaulle. The OAS was involved in over thirty plots against De Gaulle, most of which were scrapped in the planning stages. The assassination attempt depicted at the beginning of the film occurred at Petit-Clamart (a suburb of Paris) on August 22, 1962, and was led by Lt. Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry (played in the film by Jean Sorrel) of the French Air Force. After the failure of this attempt, Bastien-Thiry was executed, and most other OAS leaders imprisoned. By early 1963, the OAS was affectively neutralized. De Gaulle pardoned most of the surviving leaders in 1969.

Frederick Forsyth, the author of the novel, was working as a journalist in Paris during the time the OAS was active. He got the idea for the novel after hearing of the Petit-Clamart shooting and considering how he would go about killing De Gaulle, deciding a contract killer would be the best idea. Shortly after De Gaulle's death, he decided to use this idea for a novel.

For more information, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_arm%C3%A9e_secr%C3%A8te and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Bastien-Thiry

Within the context of the film, this cannot be proven either way. In the original novel, the Gunsmith was left alive by the Jackal because the Jackal respected him (as opposed to the forger who tried to swindle him) and, perhaps more importantly, because the Gunsmith left evidence that would incriminate the Jackal should he be killed. In the book the Jackal returns to the gunsmith a third time after practicing his rifle, but this scene was not in the film. The second scene between the two ends with the Jackal asking the gunsmith for an explosive bullet and wrapping it in a handkerchief; later, he takes a shell out of the handkerchief while practicing. This implies, but not proves, that the Jackal did not kill the Gunsmith.

Some viewers claim to have seen an apparently deleted sequence involving the Jackal killing the gunsmith while testing his rifle. These scenes, if they exist, were only in early cuts of the film and are not present on any of the existing video, laserdisc, or DVD versions of the film. A similar sequence appears in the 1997 remake, "The Jackal", which may be the cause for the confusion.

No. In the book, when The Jackal finds the grave of Alexander James Quentin Duggan (Paul Oliver Duggan in the movie), he notes that the boy who died aged three and a half was born only a few months before he was, but a later scene where DCI Dixon is comparing Charles Calthrop's passport with the details of Alexander Duggan's shows that Calthrop was born several years earlier. So The Jackal could not have been Calthrop.

The novel also featured a scene in which Thomas and Dixon noted and explained the descrepancies in the descriptions of Duggan and Calthrop (hair dye, lifts in his shoes, contact lenses, etc.); for obvious reasons, the film omitted this sequence.

In the movie, the OAS are told that The Jackal killed President Trujillo. Charles Calthrop was in the Dominican Republic at the time and his name was linked to the assassination, but nothing could be proved. In the book, The Jackal MAY have carried out the Trujillo job and may have been mistaken for Charles Calthrop, but this is not made clear. What is clear is that the Charles Calthrop who turns up at the end of the story is the real Charles Calthrop, and the Special Branch stumbled across the Duggan identity by accident. They didn't even know that The Jackal was an Englishman.

The biggest difference is structurally. In the book, Lebel is not put on the case until halfway through, while in the movie he is introduced at the end of the first act (about quarter of the way through). The first half of the book shows the elaborate planning The Jackal takes and how the French slowly uncover the plot. A subplot in which Kowalksi (Wolenski in the movie) is lured into France on the pretence that his daughter is sick was cut and, in the film, Wolenski is simply knocked out while in Genoa.

The Jackal meets the gunsmith three times, not twice, in Brussels, not Genoa. The second time he is told that the tubes are not ready, so he will have to come back after test firing the gun. The Jackal fires over twenty bullets into the watermelon before using the explosive bullet, and in the movie this has been reduced to just three shots.

Lebel is a henpecked husband in the book, but has a beautiful and caring wife in the film. International police forces give Lebel several suggestions for possible Jackals, but they all prove false alarms. The British police are already investigating Charles Calthrop when someone points out the Cha-Cal connection. A meeting between Dixon and the Prime Minister is in the book but happens between scenes in the film.

The Baroness leaves the hotel before The Jackal and she is not interviewed by the police. The Jackal tracks her down and stays for several days until she discovers his identity and he ruthlessly kills her. Jacqueline does not find Colonel St. Clair having killed himself: in the novel he simply resigns his post.

The Jackal has only one crutch, not two, that contains the component parts of the rifle. The rifle in the book has a triangular stock, but is otherwise the same. The Liberation Day sequence takes up about ten percent of the novel, but almost the entire third act of the film.

Many other subplots were cut from the novel. A significant amount of time is devoted in the book to the French government's cooperation with the Unione Corse, the Corsican Mafia based in Southern France. The OAS leaders are given considerably more time as they tensely monitor the Jackal's assassination plot, and Wolenski has a much larger role. The British investigation is back-grounded by recent tensions between Britain and France (France had recently rejected Britain's attempt to join the European Economics Union), making Thomas and Dixon's investigation more difficult. In the book, the Jackal picks up Jules, the gay man at the Turkish bath, at a gay bar while dressed as Marty Schulberg, an American college student; Per Lundqvist was a priest in the novel, not a school teacher.

Although a minor point, it should be noted that many characters' names are changed in the book. Kowalski becomes Wolenski, Jacqueline the OAS informant is re-named Denise, and Madame Challionare becomes Madame de Montpellier.