MovieChat Forums > The Day of the Jackal (1973) Discussion > Great movie, *beep* the ending!

Great movie, *beep* the ending!


Seriously, the buildup was so intense, clever, and well-thought-out, but the ending was so anticlimactic and poor. The Jackal gets killed with a blink of an eye, and then the movie ends... WHAT?..

Anyway, this movie would've been 10 out of 10 for me if not the ending. But maybe that was director's intention, to have the Jackal appear out of nowhere and then disappear with a blink of an eye.

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Well, after the jackal died, there was a final sequence where the real Charles Calthrop appears at his flat, so obviously Charles Calthrop was not the jackal, which means they didn't know who he really was.

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What happened to the three OAS bigwigs would have been interesting to know. But the book doesn't tell us either.😒

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Well, it was always difficult to kill De Gaulle in the film and novel when most people would know he did not get assassinated. The director was not Tarantino, who could have Hitler killed in a movie theatre in 1944, contrary to historical fact.
The OAS gradually petered out as an armed organisation but some of them went to Latin America where they were sometimes active supporters of military coups. There was an amnesty for imprisoned OAS members in France in 1968. In that year the left was more worrying and the OAS were more far right than left.

"Chicken soup - with a *beep* straw."

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I agree, the final showdown was too abrupt. Even a couple of extra cuts, of the Jackal and Lebel reloading, would have added hugely to the tension of the scene, but as they say, it was over too soon.

Actually, they said 23 passports had been issued for Charles H. Calthrop in the last 5-years, so it's possible the Jackal really was Charles Calthrop, just not the one they had staked out.

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