There have been 3 or 4 brief comments on this film--the 1997 and the 1973 releases/editions. I saw "The Jackal" last night on TV in Australia and the following prose-poem places the film in the overall context of my life. This posting is a slightly different kind of comment on the film than usually appears in these threads. My comment may be a little too personalized for some readers.
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A PRECISIONED INSTRUMENT

In 1970, as I was preparing at the age of 26 to come to teach in Australia, Frederick Forsyth started writing his first novel. His novels were all spy-fiction pieces, thrillers of the first or the second order--or so it is said, for I do not read spy thrillers or, indeed, fiction of any ilk. In 1971, as I arrived in Australia, Forsyth's novel The Day of the Jackal hit the marketplace. It portrayed, among other things, a credible picture of the political landscape in France in 1963. In 1972, as I began teaching high school in South Australia, Forsyth's novel was made into a film. Twenty-five years later, in 1997, this spy-novel was made into a film again starring Bruce Willis as the hired assassin, as The Jackal. My life as a university student(1963-1967) and then as a teacher(1967-2005) has been bracketed by the events in this book and the two film versions that came after it. I saw the film for the second time last night many months after leaving my teaching role. This second viewing of a story that had its beginning at one of the historic junctures in Bahá’í history, in 1963, gave rise to the following prose-poem. -Ron Price, "The Jackal," TDT:TV, 10:30-12:30 October 21st 2006.

I often thought and felt there was
some metaphorical quality to the
themes of this book-film and I was
reminded of it yet again last night
as I watched The Jackal, as another
Five Year Plan slipped into the second
half of its first year and I slipped into
the fourth year of late adulthood.

A precisioned instrument is what one
needs to be as Doug Martin put it back
in '65 when I was 21 and as incapable
then as now of assassinating my lower
self, dispelling the darkness of the world
of nature,1 and driving it far, far, away.
One takes one's attack to the very centre
of the powers of the earth through a
superhuman service2 and a Plan one
carries to one's death in this winter
of unprecedented severity in these
years of gathering storm clouds
and the darkest hours before the dawn.

1 'Abdu'l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, USA, 1977, 1p.67 and 2p.22.

Ron Price
October 22nd 2006