MovieChat Forums > The Day of the Jackal (1973) Discussion > Questions

Questions

posted 13 years ago by IFeedPigeons
5 replies | jump to latest

1a. Who was the man on the horse that Denise caused to fall off?
1b. What was the purpose of her deliberately doing that?

2. Why did The Jackal steal Madame Montpellier's car? That made it practically certain to identify him as the mysterious man who visited her at home, given the fact that they had met (and more!) at the hotel. That potentially puts him at the scene of the crime.
He killed her so she wouldn't call the police on him, but not the servants who could have identified him. It seems to me that he switched cars too often, and taking her car was a risk/mistake. I think he would have been safer to keep driving around in the accident victims car. The police got there after the crash, when he had already taken the guy's car, so they wouldn't know it from Adam.

3. What was the purpose of The JacKal going to the Turkish Bath house?

Any answers would be most appreciated. Cheers.

[–] 13 years ago

[deleted]

[–] IFeedPigeons 13 years ago

1. Oh, so the guy who told her of a 'crisis' when they were in bed together WAS the guy on the horse? I thought that must be him, but was still not sure because he looked entirely like another person in those 2 scenes. In bed and in the dark he looked younger and had facial hair, or is my eyesight worse than I thought?

2. That sounds plausible, but I still think taking her car was not smart when he didn't have to.

3. Change of pace, good hiding spot -- gotcha. (I still feel sorry for that lobster being dropped to the floor, but it beats the hell out of being
cooked - unless the police ate him!)

Thanks for your reply.

[–] ex-pfc-wintergreen 12 years ago

2. What was really not smart was parking her car close to a barely used train station and then taking the train to Paris.

3. I doubt the police drove the lobster home, so it probably came to a bad end.

========

Somethings that have always bothered me:

1. Buying hair tint in London and putting it in Old Spice bottles instead of buying it in France; that wouldn't have been fun to explain to border guards or suspicious French policemen.

2. Carrying all those suit cases around instead of buying his clothes in France. In the novel, he did it to get the labels to match the clothes to the country where the person whose passport he was using came from. Why not just take the labels from the clothes he bought in the other countries and sew them in to clothes he bought in France? Carrying one small suitcase and a briefcase like business travelers do would have made him blend in better.

3. When he was disguised as the WW2 war veteran, he only dyed the hair that showed beneath his cap. That was dumb. If the French cop had told him to take off his cap so he could get a better look at him, the Jackal would have been dead in the water and couldn't have gotten away with his leg from the knee down tied up to make it look like it had been amputated.

[–] fordraff 12 years ago

No one here seems to understand the homosexual implications of the bath house scene. Bath houses the world over are good places for gay men to find sexual partners. The Jackal knew he was attractive enough to quickly engage another man's attention in the bath, and so it was. Once the man invited the Jackal home, the Jackal knew he had a hiding place. Obviously, the two had sex when they went home together. The Jackal would have had to kill the man from the bath house in any event, especially once the Jackal's face was shown on TV.

[–] turtletommy 12 years ago

The Jackal knew he was picking up a gay man at the bathhouse but it wasn't "obvious" that they had sex. In the novel they don't, as in the movie the Jackal kills him.