10 Deadliest Movie Assassins And Hitmen

9. The Jackal (Assassin)

In modern fiction and screen drama, the archetype of the assassin became equated with €˜cool€™ on account of its aloofness and detachment. Far removed from political or theological commitment, he was the professional profiteer who would perform the fanatics€™ dirty work for them. All at the standard market rate, of course. The modern template for the detached pro killer in pop fiction is Frederick Forsyth€™s The Day of the Jackal. Forsyth, a teeth-clenching British conservative, bridges the gap between the Cold War morality of John Le Carré and the technophile espionage blockbusters of Tom Clancy. The strength of his early novels, as exemplified in JACKAL, is that he was able to stitch modern history quite seamlessly into the exploits of his pulp-fiction characters. When Forsyth€™s immensely successful novel was filmed as a 1973 Anglo-French co-production, Hollywood veteran HIGH NOON director Fred Zinnemann acknowledged "the peculiar fascination of a man who was anonymous, nobody knows him including the reader". For his Jackal, Zinnemann chose Edward Fox, the epitome of the cravat-wearing, cold-blooded, upper-crust Englishman, "against the type of what one would think a professional killer looks like". The Jackal€™s telescopic rifle sights are focused on the form of General Charles De Gaulle, hero of the Free French movement in WWII and long-serving French president. While basically a right-winger himself, De Gaulle was enough of a realist to accept, in his last long period of government, that France€™s days as an imperial power were over. Granting independence to Algeria in 1962, he curtailed a long and destructive guerrilla/terrorist war in the former North African colony. It may have meant that fewer hand grenades were thrown in the Kasbah, but it earned De Gaulle enemies at home. The Organisation Armée Secrète (OSA) was a terrorist organisation largely comprising former members of the French Army, who regarded the liberation of Algeria as a major betrayal of Mother France. In a direct inversion of our own times, the Gallic supremacists targeted Muslim groups and communities along with their perceived enemies in government. De Gaulle became the subject of no less than six assassination attempts. The last and most serious, in August 1962, left his chauffeured car riddled with bullets but the general almost unscathed. For this, one of those accused of leading the conspiracy, Colonel Bastien-Thiry, would face a firing squad the following year. The fiction takes over one year after the OSA machine-gunned the President€™s car. Seeking vengeance for Bastien-Thiry and the completion of their failed mission, the OSA commission a foreign contract killer to the tune of a cool half-million in sterling. In a further meshing of fact and fiction, Forsyth credits him with the assassination of Franco-ist dictator General Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, during 1961. (In reality, those accused of the assassination conspiracy were tortured, shot by firing squad and fed to sharks.) €˜The Jackal€™ is an archetype writ large; any hint as to his possible real identity is a red herring, as he routinely lifts false identities from sources such as a buried child and forges his papers. Aloofly professional and an expert in ballistics, he quickly becomes (anti)heroic through his moral parity with the French security services, who are prepared to torture an OSA operative to death to gain information. So it is that we follow him noiselessly strangling the woman with whom he€™s having a sexual liaison to protect his identity, or ruthlessly killing an old lady, while admiring his self-reliance and ingenuity. He does, of course, eventually go down in a hail of bullets as his own attempt to shoot De Gaulle at a Liberation Day ceremony fails. Thus the €˜factional€™ context is maintained by the anonymous Jackal dying in obscurity, the world unaware of his deeds. Bruce Willis later took the title role in the completely fictional Hollywood version, The Jackal. With a plot about a hit on the Azerbaijani Mafia and Richard Gere as an improbable IRA sniper, its dislocation from the cold realism of the 1975 film makes it just another competent action movie.