Bound

Released from prison after a five stretch for the "redistribution of wealth", Corky (Gina Gershon) lands a bum job fixing up an apartment in a mob-owned tenement block. The people next door are Caesar (Joe Pantoliano) and his moll Violet (Jennifer Tilly). Caesar works for Gino Marzzone (Richard C Sarafian) and as such has to endure being partnered with Gino's viciously unpredictable son Johnnie (Christopher Meloni).

Violet, tired of all the macho bullshit and her designated role as trophy girlfriend/plaything, is immediately attracted to resilient, tough-talking Corky and the pair soon begin a clandestine relationship. But the secrecy only complicates Violet's life. She wants out; away from Caesar and his cronies; a new start in life.

When Caesar and Johnnie recover $2million in misappropriated funds from light-fingered mob accountant Shelly (Barry Kivel) and the currency is left in Caesar's safekeeping pending Gino's arrival from out of town to collect it, Violet and Corky hit upon a plan to swipe the cash and have Caesar take the fall.
At a cursory glance, I'd say pretty much all the requirements for an old-school crime caper are present and accounted for: a suitcase full of cash, an elaborate sting, an unexpected development that sends the carefully delineated plan spinning into freefall, a duped and vengeful loser, a corpulent mob boss, a loose-cannon wiseguy and a husky femme fatale. One who just happens to like other women.

This is the central conceit of 'Bound' - the machismo of the genre given a fresh spin by the elevation to protagonist of not just the gangster's moll but her lesbian lover - and might easily have been its failing. With its catalogue of shoot-outs, profane verbal stand offs, heads slammed against bathroom fixings and fingers snipped off with secateurs, 'Bound' has its share of exploitative elements. In the hands of many directors - especially, as here, two male co-directors - the romantic element could have been an exploitation scene too far, a bit of steamy soft-focus girl/girl action between the beatings and the gunplay.

Kudos to the brothers Wachowski, then, that they took Violet and Corky seriously as characters, and treated their relationship seriously as well. Don't get me wrong, the big sex scene in 'Bound' is steamy - but it's erotic in the proper sense, a culmination of the attraction and flirtation between Violet and Corky that hasn't so much simmered as ignited into flame and melted the celluloid during the first quarter of the film. Kudos again to the Wachowskis for retaining feminist and sex education expert Susie Bright as a consultant (she cameos in a bar room scene). The imagery and symbolism of the early scenes (most notably in Violet and Corky's first conversation) emphasise the feminine. I'd be willing to bet, if 'Bound' weren't so plot-driven and firmly pigeonholed as a crime movie (and, perhaps, if the Wachowskis hadn't gone onto create the beefed up mythology of the 'Matrix' trilogy and the day-glo vapidity of 'Speed Racer', that critics would be quick to tag the film as pro-feminist.

Umm, actually that's wrong. Andy and Larry Wachowski had already created 'The Matrix' ... well, they'd written the script for the first film anyway. 'Bound' was conceived as a stepping-stone, a low-budget debut that would prove they were capable of making the leap from writers (their original screenplay 'Assassins' had, albeit in a much mucked about with version, been filmed) to directors. Their aim was to instill enough confidence in the money men that 'The Matrix' would go into production with them at the helm.

A film, in other words, that got made purely so they could get another film made. And five films into their career it remains the best thing they've done.

Sonatine

Review as haiku,
the seventeen syllables
counted on fingers.

Gangster set-pieces
dominate opening scenes
before stillness falls.

Violence erupts
in deadpan nightclub shoot-out,
gunplay played for laughs.

Bad men now lie low
where sea, sand, horizon meet:
killers killing time.

Measured pace gives hints
of classical film-making,
Ozu with uzis.

Writer-director
"Beat" Takeshi Kitano
exudes po-faced cool.

Bad men pass the time,
sumo and Russian roulette,
triggers pulled with smiles.

PERSONAL FAVES: Carlito's Way

Made ten years later, 'Carlito's Way' plays out like the flipside to 'Scarface'. In place of an aggressive young hothead on the rise, a middle-aged career criminal trying to go straight after an appeal frees him from prison. In place of glamorous locations and opulence, broken down neighbourhoods and a sense of lives wasted. In place of "THE WORLD IS YOURS" on the side of a blimp, "ESCAPE TO PARADISE" on a travel agent's poster. What both films share is the illusion of these promises.

Both protagonists share a self-declared integrity that proves their downfall. Tony Montana tells anyone who'll listen that he only has two things "my word and my balls" and quickly comes to believe his own publicity - comes to believe, in other words, that he's invulnerable. Carlito Brigante (Pacino) is fiercely loyal - a debt owed is one he's honour-bound to discharge. And he owes lawyer Dave Kleinfeld (Sean Penn) big time.

Kleinfeld has exploited an irregularity in the District Attorney investigation that put Carlito behind bars, launching an appeal that gets him out after just five years of a thirty stretch. Determining to go straight, Carlito devotes himself to putting together the money he needs to buy a legitimate business. A favour to his cousin on his first day out sees him mixed up in drug deal that goes bad; within minutes there's bodies all over the place, Carlito's wounded and he's on a hiding right back to the slammer if he doesn't get out of there PDQ. On the plus side, with all the other participants dead, the $30K that finds its way into his pocket makes for a decent bit of start-up capital.

Another favour, to debt-addled nightclub owner Saso (Jorge Porcel), sees Carlito running the joint, assisted by Pachanga (the great Luis Guzman*). The money's coming in, he's rekindled a romance with old flame Gail (Penelope Ann Miller) and his dream of a normal life is looking more and more real. There are just two flies in the ointment.

One is Benny Blanco (John Leguizamo), a big-talking wannabe who's squeezing Sosa for money owed. Carlito has him ejected from the nightclub after he starts some shit but goes against his deeply ingrained instincts to whack Benny and instead lets him walk away.

The other is Kleinfeld. One of his clients, Tony Taglialucci (Frank Minucci), has a line of credit with Kleinfeld to the tune of a million dollars he entrusted to Kleinfeld to make a payoff but which went into the lawyer's back pocket. Taglialucci is terminally ill and doing time on the Riker's Island Prison Barge. It's his dying wish to break out. An inside man can get him off the barge. All he needs is someone to fish him out of the river. Kleinfeld owns a boat. Taglialucci orders Kleinfeld to liaise with his sons and be on the river at the appointed time. Convinced the Taglialucci boys will summarily dispose of him once their dad's safe and sound, Kleinfeld asks Carlito to repay the favour.

And Carlito has no choice but to help. As he puts it when Gail pleads with him not to get involved: "Dave is my friend. I owe him. That's what I am. Right or wrong, I can't change that."

Things go wrong. Kleinfeld, coked to the gills, takes matters into his own hands and crosses the line. Sosa tips Carlito off that Pachanga's loyalties are divided, then proves to be duplicitous himself when Carlito finds that money is missing from the club. Some made guys who were associated with Taglialucci want answers over the break-out snafu. Then the DA comes calling ...

If 'Scarface' is an exercise in surface value, 'Carlito's Way' is deeper, more considered, much more accomplished. Pacino's Carlito Brigante is introspective and complex where Tony Montana was extrovert and brutally simplistic. Carlito's relationship with Gail provides an emotional crux. In 'Scarface', the stakes were purely monetary. Here, they're infinitely higher. So when the net begins to tighten and Carlito's bid for freedom turns into a desparate race against both time and a bunch of men with guns, de Palma ratchets the tension to an unbearable level. In one extended, heart-pounding sequence, a battle of wits at the nightclub segues into a skin-of-the-teeth escape, leading to a tense subway pursuit and culminating in a cat-and-mouse showdown at Grand Central Station.

What makes de Palma's achievement so impressive is that he's already revealed how it ends - in the opening credits. Two hours spent building up to an ending the audience already know - and a real downer of an ending at that - yet you barely breathe for the fifteen minutes Carlito spends running for his life, running for a future summed up by three words on a poster; an advert; something crafted to fool people into believing.

*Amazingly, this is the first time I've featured a Luis Guzman film on the blog. He's one of those actors who automatically makes you smile when you see his name in the opening credits; you know, however else the film might pan out, that you're in for at least one great performance.

Scarface

An oft-repeated criticism of 'Scarface' is its portrayal of Cubans. Which is kind of laughable given the American government's attitude towards Cuba. I don't really think there's much American film-makers can do to compound the insult. Nonetheless, it's an easy criticism to understand. Opening with a news footage montage showing the boat people arriving in the US, title cards inform us that of the quarter of a million refugees who left Cuba in 1980, an estimated 25,000 had criminal records.

It's swiftly insinuated that Tony Montana (Al Pacino) counts for one of them. Detained, along with his friend Manny (Steven Bauer) at the ironically-named Freedomland (a refugee camp situated beneath an underpass), Tony embraces the American dream by undertaking a hit on a political dissident in return for a green card. Oh, and a job. If you can call sweating over a greasy stove in a burger van a job. Needless to say, Tony and Manny soon investigate career opportunities outside of the catering industry.

Omar Suarez (F. Murray Abraham), number two to paunchy mob boss Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia), gives them a taste of the criminal underworld - both its dangers (Tony is almost eviscerated by a chainsaw when his contact on his first job pulls a double-cross) and its rewards. One of the rewards is that a balding declasse middle-aged guy with a fake tan and a lot of bling gets the svelte, smart-mouthed and sexily contemptuous Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer) on his arm. Tony decides he wants what Frank has. Particularly Elvira.

Tony strengthens his powerbase after Frank sends him and Omar to lay the groundwork for a deal with Bolivian drug lord Alejandro Sosa (Paul Shenar). Sosa recognises Omar as a stool pigeon and has him taken care of. Sensing he can trust Tony, Sosa makes the deal directly with him. This doesn't go over too well with Frank, who decides Tony's becoming a liability.

The key scene for me - and one of de Palma's trademark set-pieces - takes place in a nightclub. Plot points and narrative developments converge in such a cluster it's surprising one of the staff doesn't show them over to a table of their own. One near the stage. That way they could enjoy the cavortings of Octavio the Clown, though they'd have to scoot out the way PDQ as soon as the shoot-out starts. But I'm getting ahead of myself ...

Tony and Manny show up, the former not impressed to see his sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) enjoying a bit of the old bump and grind with some greasy lowlife, the latter not impressed that he's not the object of said bumping and grinding (Manny's hots for Tony's sister is something that has serious ramifications later on). When Gina's bit of rough leads her off to the toilets for a quick fumble and a line of coke (classy guy!), Tony sees red. His mood is already tense after a conversation with bent cop Mel Bernstein (Harris Yulin) who wants monthly payoffs from Tony and his holidays paid for. Then Frank and Elvira turn up, the latter unresponsive (as yet) to Tony's attentions and there's an altercation.

So we've had, in one ten minute scene, the Tony/Gina/Gina's boyfriend situation, the simmering Gina/Manny tension, the Tony/Bernstein issue, the unresolved Tony/Elvira tension, and the Tony/Frank stand-off. Throw into the mix the two gunmen waiting for the spotlight to drift away from Octavio's performance and light up Tony's table ...

De Palma's camera navigates the nightclub, and the intricacies of the scene, with effortless panache. In a film that has more than its share of set-pieces - the aforementioned business with the chainsaw, Tony's settling of the score with Frank, the abortive hit Tony undertakes at Sosa's behest, the 'Wild Bunch'-style shoot-out at Tony's mansion - this is a stand-out both technically and in terms of advancement of narrative. It's after Tony survives the ensuing gunplay that his ruthless ambition really drives him forward; ten minutes later, we're in montage territory, hundred dollar bills whizzing through a counting machine, Elvira on Tony's arm, vans pulling up in front of a bank and tough guys in sharp suits hauling bulking sacks of currency inside. All cut to Giorgio Morodor's pumped-up score.

And from here, 'Scarface' enters the downward curve of its narrative arc. If 'Little Caesar' is perhaps cinema's first rise-and-fall gangster epic (albeit shoehorned into 77 minutes), then 'Scarface' is one of its fullest expositions, the narrative arc charted across a properly epic running time of two and three quarter hours.

'Scarface' blew me away the first time I saw it, in my late teens. Everything about it was big: its length, the performances, the production design, the verbal outbursts (particularly Pacino's "take a look at the bad guy" rant in an upmarket restaurant) and the violence. I watched the video quite a few times in my twenties. I picked up the DVD as part of a Pacino box set recently and this afternoon is the first time I've seen it in maybe a decade. It's still a hell of movie, for all of the reasons mentioned. But it's an empty one. All surface: glossy and immediate and superficial. Which is kind of the point - the theme is moral bankrupcy, and de Palma achieves some 'Citizen Kane'-style images of his protagonist alone by his own actions in a mansion filled with very expensive but worthless things - but the bravura staging of the final massacre (with its all-together-now iconic line "say hello to my little friend") strives to make a martyr of Tony Montana. Unlike Henry Hill in 'Goodfellas', he doesn't get to live out the rest of his life like a shmuck - he gets to be the messiah of movie violence, instead, only defeated when someone shoots him in the back; the poster boy for everything de Palma and writer Oliver Stone were meant to be criticising.

"First you get the money, then you get the power," Tony declares soon after he and Manny get their start with Frank, opining that it's only after these two achievements that you get the women; "that's the way it works in this country." From the outset, Tony's vision of America is as a big fat dollar sign waiting for him to grab a chunk of it. The blimp he sees shortly after taking over Frank's operation - the message "THE WORLD IS YOURS" blinking out in huge letters - is at once his mission statement, his epitaph and the big lie he fell for.

A film criticised for its depiction of Cubans? As much as 'Scarface' can be said to be about anything, it's about how the American dream, no matter how villainous those who pursue it, is always the bigger bad guy.

Al Pacino double bill

I enjoyed last weekend's James Cagney double-bill. The hit-and-run style of reviewing - watch the film, hammer out the article, post it online, watch the next film, repeat - made the experience a lot more immediate than my usual modus operandi of watch film, let my thoughts about it percolate in the back of my mind for a few days, draft out an article, revisit it the next day, edit, polish, correct typos, generally dick around with it for probably longer than necessary.

So I've decided to repeat the exercise today. Longer films this time, so expect the second review much later this evening.

Our subject: a pair of gangster movies (interesting that the general "crime movie" remit of Shots on the Blog seems to have gravitated so specifically towards the gangster movie), one made in the '80s and very redolent of the rampant materialism of that decade, the other in the '90s and more introspective in its approach - that pair Al Pacino with director Brian de Palma. I don't think I've written about a de Palma film yet on The Agitation of the Mind. Let's rectify that. He's an interesting if frustrating film-maker.

I've often heard this summarising comment applied to Stanley Kubrick's ouevre (and not without justification): that his films are technically brilliant but devoid of emotionalism. You could easily say the same of de Palma, and in fact use the comparison to point up that as technically-minded as Kubrick is at the cost of the human element, his films are also very accomplished narratively. Not only is de Palma's work generally lacking emotionally (although one of this afternoon's choices provides an exception to the rule as does, say, 'Blow Out'), he's not adverse to sacrificing narrative coherence for the sake of showmanship (pick your own example here; I can think of at least half a dozen without even flipping onto IMDb to refresh my memory).

De Palma's also an ideal director to engage with right now because, generally speaking, his best outings have a crime/mystery/gangster bent. In order to maintain the integrity of that statement, I am going to have to pretend that 'The Black Dahlia' doesn't exist - or, better still, imagine myself in an alternative reality where David Fincher had directed it and was currently in pre-production with James Ellroy's follow-up 'The Big Nowhere' and not some Facebook flick.

But I digress. The first film of the afternoon is sliding into the DVD player and a definitively dodgy dude is about to get off the boat from Cuba ...

Little Caesar

You can tell a lot about a gangster film by its dialogue. Ideally it should be terse, quotable, make poetry of profanity and bristle with barely-below-the-surface aggression.

Some examples:

"I'm a mook? Wassa mook? You can't call me a mook." - 'Mean Streets'

"Now go home and get your fuckin' shinebox." - 'Goodfellas'

"Never have anything in your life that you can't walk out on, in five seconds flat, if you feel the heat coming round the corner." - 'Heat'

Now here's a line from 'Little Caesar':

"What a fine pickle we're in."

Excuse me?!? A fine freakin' pickle? Did these tommy-gun-toting bad boys all of a sudden astrally project from the gin joints and shadowy back alleys of Chicago to the less-than-mean-streets of a Noel Coward play? A spot of robbery and murder before we break out the cucumber sandwiches, what ho, chaps? More tea, Rico? What next? Tony Montana saying, "Allow me to introduce you to my diminutive companions"? Michael Corleone opining, "I say, old bean, it doesn't do to trust anybody outside of the family"?

A fine pickle, indeed! Okay, I wasn't expecting "mook" and "shinebox" and "motherfucker" every other line, but this was 1930 and pre-Hayes Code and the dialogue could have been edgier.

So, moving on from Francis Faragoh's stilted screenplay (an adaptation of William R. Burnett's novel), how does 'Little Caesar' stand up nearly 80 years after it debuted?

I'm loathe to badmouth the acting - allowances have to be made for films of a certain era where performance styles still carried over a lot of baggage from the artificiality of theatre and the exaggerated expressivity of silent movies - but it has to be said: with one honourable exception, the acting in 'Little Caesar' is as creaky, stilted and generally shoddy as the script. Leaden, inelegant line readings. Awkward physicality. The scenes between Rico's lily-livered friend Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks Jnr) and his twinkletoes girlfriend Olga (Glenda Farrell) are nauseatingly melodramatic.

So what makes 'Little Caesar' a classic? It's not as if it were the first gangster film, or the first to elevate villain to protagonist. It does, however, represent the first example I can think of where a gangster film charts a rise-and-fall narrative arc. Director Mervyn LeRoy shoots for the moon in terms of structure, incident and narrative development, a scant 77 minutes taking small time thug Rico (Edward G. Robinson) from gas station stick-up merchant to right-hand-man to an established Chicago mob boss, a man whose rule he deposes. The gang now his, Rico unflinchingly despatches one of his own when the dumb shmuck in question develops a bad case of moral conscience and takes himself off to see the priest. His death, gunned down on the cathedral steps in what is perhaps cinema's earliest depiction of a drive-by, is as iconic as it is shocking.

Rico also finds himself at daggers drawn with Joe, once his buddy and partner in crime, now gone soft and more interested in establishing himself as one half of a dance act with Olga. But while Joe and Olga are knocking the crowds dead at flashy hotspot The Bronze Peacock, Rico has designs on knocking the joint off.

The robbery itself is another reason 'Little Caesar' endures. The heist was still a-ways off being a veritable genre cliche back in 1930, and no-one would have faulted LeRoy for filming it straight: gunmen bursting in, shots fired, crowds subdued, cash grabbed, tyre-squealing escape made. But no; he does it differently. As differently as I've ever seen a heist scene done. He films both the gang's modus operandi and the reactions of the patrons as a sequence of almost abstract tableaux and effects a series of dissolves between them. It's like watching the bank job set-piece in 'Heat' redone in the style of Chris Marker's 'La Jetee'.

And, ultimately, 'Little Caesar' earns its status as a classic because of Edward G. Robinson. He swaggers, sneers, backstabs and browbeats his way through the story, even maintaining a full-on contempt for authority figures, rival hoods and average joes when his empire crumbles and he goes to ground. He's as unmalleable a character as Edward Fox's Jackal; he presupposes the line in 'Goodfellas' where Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) says of Tommy de Vito (Joe Pesci) that if you beat him with your fists he'd come at you with a knife, if you beat him with a knife he'd come at you with a gun and if you beat him with a gun you'd better finish the job because he'd just keep coming back at you till one of you were dead.

Rico is the gangster genre's original fedora-wearing badass mo' fo'. There's hardly been a single gangster down the decades and under the direction of anyone from Coppola to Scorsese to de Palma who doesn't owe Rico a debt of honour and quite possibly a share of the profits.

The Day of the Jackal

The hitman is a staple of crime fiction. Maybe even more so in novels than films. The two best hitman novels, for my money, are 'Rogue Male' by Geoffrey Household and 'The Day of the Jackal' by Frederick Forsyth. Household humanises his protagonist; Forsyth keeps his an enigma. Household's novel is a rivetting aftermath story, focussing on the ramifications of a failed assassination attempt; Forsyth's a brilliantly paced account of the build-up to one. A novel which details, precisely and without any sensationalism, the logistics of killing someone.

Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of 'The Day of the Jackal' keys in to the procedural aspect of the narrative. The Jackal (Edward Fox)'s meticulous planning in the early stages - and, later, his talent for extemporisation when things go wrong and the net starts to tighten - is contrasted with the diligent investigative work of Deputy Commissioner Claude Lebel (Michel Lonsdale), the man tasked with stopping him. With saving the life of his intended victim, Charles de Gaulle.

Now who would want to assassinate the President of France? A little outfit called the OAS, for one. They're a mite peeved that de Gaulle has granted independence to Algeria, seeing this kind of thing as decidedly un-French, and, in a pacy opening sequence, try to whack him themselves. This entails a handful of men with machineguns popping out from behind parked cars as The Prez's limo cruises by and letting rip. A portentous voice-over muses that seven seconds elapsed, 140 rounds were expended, one bullet (in a close but no gitane scenario) came within an inch of de Gaulle's noggin, but - crucially - no-one was injured.

If there's any factual basis in this it would seem that scary terrorist movements, in the '70s at least, were defined by the Baader-Meinhof group, the Red Hand Gang and the PLO, while the OAS brought up the rear, trailing quite a long way behind the Dennis the Menace Fan Club and the Dagenham Girl Pipers.

When the ringleaders are brought to justice and the OAS CEO invited to a blindfold party (fellow guests: a dozen bullets), the remaining members decide that a safer alternative - and one more likely to succeed - is the hiring of a renowned English hitman. Let me just reiterate that: a bunch of French guys resort to paying an English guy to do the job properly. Ouch, that's gotta hurt!

The Jackal, accepting the commission, reminds his employers that "this is a once-in-a-lifetime job, whoever does it can never work again". They ask his price. Remember that hilarious scene in the first 'Austin Powers' movie where Dr Evil asks for "one ... million ... dollars"? The Jackal asks for half a million. Jeez, even the subway hijack crew in 'The Taking of Pelham One Two Three', made just one year later in 1974, ask for the full million. To make it worse, the half mill the Jackal asks for - it's not even dollars. It's francs. Bloody good job he's not doing the hit in 2009; he'd get paid in Euros and probably just be able to afford a restaurant car sandwich during his trip back on the Eurostar.

But I digress ...

The Jackal warns his employers that their organisation is riddled with moles, and suggests that those few who are party to his involvement should go to ground, keep a low profile and generally STFU. Unfortunately, the necessity of some high-profile bank robberies, payroll hold-ups and jewellery store heists in order to raise funds brings the heat down on them and senior OAS man Wolenski (Jean Morel) is nabbed by French security operatives. They interrogate him with such zealous brutality that I half expected Dudley Smith from 'L.A. Confidential' to step out from the shadows and ask Wolenski if he has a valediction, boyo.

Wolenski squeals. The authorities now know that de Gaulle's life is under threat and the assassin is operating under the codename Jackal. A manhunt gets underway, Lebel at the helm.

On one hand 'The Day of the Jackal' can be dismissed as an overlong, over-plotted co-production that's only just one spoonful of custard short of being a Euro-pudding; a work by the director of 'High Noon', 'From Here to Eternity' and 'A Man For All Seasons' which ticks along on narrative developments and accretion of detail rather than characterisation and human drama; a film which is, with the exception of a melon suspended from a tree exploding as the Jackal puts a practice shot through it, devoid of iconic or memorable imagery.

But that's kind of missing the point. 'The Day of the Jackal' is meant to be slightly bland; meant to dwell on minutiae. The devil is in the detail, be it the Jackal adjusting the sight on his rifle after the first couple of practice shots go wide, or stripping to the waist and doing a quick al fresco respray job on his car to throw the police off his trail for just a few hours longer. Or Lebel and his right-hand-man Caron (Derek Jacobi) painstakingly liaising with their opposite numbers in England, Italy and America, checking and cross-checking possible leads, chasing down that one clue that might put them on the trail.

The detail is in the Jackal's business meetings with the gunsmith (Cyril Cusack) who manufactures a portable, lightweight rifle to the hitman's specifications, and the snivelling forger (Ronald Pickup) who tries to blackmail him and pays the price. Fox is perfect as the Jackal, breezing through these scenes with an easy charm and ineffable civility, only for the mask to peel microscopically back at certain moments and reveal the icy cold reserve beneath; the glacial professionalism and emotional detachment.

Determinedly keeping pace with Forsyth's heavily-populated and labyrinthine plot, Zinnemann's direction follows the blueprint of Kenneth Ross's screenplay like a mechanic referring to the Haynes manual. Wisely, writer and director decline to find a human side to the Jackal or probe his backstory, and this more than anything is what boosts 'The Day of the Jackal' up a notch beyond the merely formulaic. The Jackal - everything about him a mystery, from his identity to why he became a killer to how he honed his various skills - is as absolute a character as, say, Michael Myers in 'Halloween'. He is what he is; he offers no explanation for himself; he simply stalks through the film with an implacable relentlessness. He'd probably put two in my head just for the glib tone of this article.