Based on one of the best thrillers ever written, the Day of the Jackal was made in 1973 and then rather poorly remade in 1997. Only the novel by Frederick Forsyth and the first film include a Swiss bank account.

The plot is very simple. Renegade French generals from the OAS hire a British assassin to kill De Gaulle for his Algerian policy. The assassin asks for a $500,000 fee, half of which to be deposited on his Swiss bank account before the work is completed.

There is no scene at the bank but we see the assassin give his bank details to the OAS men. He later receives a phone call from his banker in Zurich to confirm the money has arrived.

Much of the appeal of this story is the great realism of even its most minute details. The way the Swiss account is used is rather realistic. It appears that the assassin used a fake identity to open the account, which was of course illegal in Switzerland even in the 1960's. We see how the assassin obtains a genuine new passport using the usual birth certificate fraud which was apparently rather easy at this time. We can thus assume that the bank opened the account for this good looking, articulate British man without suspecting he was one of the world's top hired guns. In those years there was no need for the bank to know the origin of the funds deposited by its clients, and in this fictional case the assassin could well have gotten away with the vaguest of explanations for the $250,000 advance paid by the OAS. The scene is thus realistic, although of course one must hope such a thing never actually occured, and it would certainly not be possible today.

The other leading character in this movie is that of Commissaire Lebel, the top French policeman who tries to locate the Jackal before he can kill the French president. The role is interpreted by Michael Lonsdale, who has also parts in other movies in our anthology.