Fake Antique and Hardy Perennial

...But if you want nostalgia of a harsher sort, you are treated to images of slatternly, rural graveyards, with ramshackle tombstones looking like scattered corpses...

...That something is the fascinating interaction of skill and luck, of know-how and pure chance...

...the sundry accomplices, such as gunsmiths, forgers, even ordinary citizens inveigled by the assassin...

...The child is much too clever for her age, and the adult is rather too dumb for a man supposedly living by his wits...

...there is, moreover, a prevailing restraint and finesse that suggest the violence and sexuality quite sufficiently without unduly dwelling on them...

...There is, first of all, plenty of jolly nostalgia for the '30s —indeed, the credits list almost as many old radio performers and recording artists as they do names of present actors and technicians who worked on the film...

...as for Ryan O'Neal, he simply depends on his youthful good looks...

...It is the ironies of fate, the happy guesses or miscalculations, the sudden windfalls or stumbling blocks, the labyrinthine ways by which plans and people reach their unforeseeable ends, that The Day of the Jackal traces with exemplary nonpartisanship...

...He looks like a cross between Burt Lancaster and Jean-Pierre Aumont, so that his very face is a neat synthesis of tough guy and subtle technician...

...Thus Mose falls for an obvious trollop and carries on about her as if she were a real lady, although he is presented as a man who has casually consumed his share of tarts...

...The final irony, in particular, proves a manifest phony on closer inspection...

...The Jackal is not made particularly likable (but, then, neither was de Gaulle), yet he earns our grudging admiration for his cold-blooded temerity, his great versatility and inventiveness, his professional dedication to his monstrous task, his controlled viciousness that kills only when necessary...

...7 innemann sagely keeps the human element at a minimum, concentrating instead on a process and counterprocess, on the minuteness and unpredictability of the events that tip the scale now in favor of the Jackal, now in that of Inspector Lebel...

...Yet it needs only be compared to a similar film about hired assassins and international intrigue...

...Addie bullies Mose into not sending her off to her relatives in Missouri, and soon exhibits a greater shrewdness than his, both for humbugging people and for keeping the ill-gotten gains prudently and parsimoniously stashed away in a cigar box-a real Bogdanovichian period piece of a cigar box, of course...

...or to pious, impoverished widows on whose gullibility the film's hero preys...

...But as long as Bogdanovich can remold the old genres he knows by heart (he is said to be planning a John Wayne Western next—clearly, there is a Ford in his future), he may prosper: The public's appetite for updated yet nostalgically backward-harking kitsch remains hearty...

...Even so, he may get his comeuppance...

...the assisting Britishers across the Channel...

...or a road that is, by some kind of trickery, seen winding into infinity and looks like that cartoon road along which the Roadrunner eludes his eternal antagonist, the Coyote...

...Either he may run out of his borrowed tricks, or he may, puffed up with the arrogance he flaunts in interviews and on talk shows, attempt something on his own hook, for which there is no clear antecedent...

...Michael Winner's Scorpio, to reveal unmistakably how chaste, sensible and meaningful it is...

...Almost accidentally, Mose finds himself stuck with nine-year-old Addie, an orphan whose illegitimate father he may have been...

...Hardly a minute goes by without a display of some vintage Nehi poster, cigarette package, railway ticket, popular song or radio show—the latter two usually cut off after a while to give a sense of them as airy fragments wispily haunting our recollfection...

...The entire cast of histrionic celebrities and near-celebrities, however, achieves not only fluid ensemble work but also that anonymity required for such quasi-documentary filmmaking...

...Seen against a stark yet comical Kansas background, Pray's prayerful preying is supposed to charm us: It is such small, naive, almost bumbling conmanship and, in the Depression, a well-nigh acceptable form of survival of the fittest...

...it details the successive stages of plotting and detection meticulously, shifting ingeniously from strand to strand of the various actions that make up the web of events, and so creating a feeling of breathless simultaneity...

...what merits the film does have are largely hers...

...Kenneth Ross' script is spare and intelligent...

...Altogether, the movie is perfectly happy running from tear-jerker to comic strip and back, and the devil take the hindmost...

...they are relatively infrequent here, but they are troublesome...

...Personally, I would have liked to know how the Jackal seduced the chilly Baroness, but I can sacrifice such points to matters of graver import...

...But his little daughter Tatum is quite an actress already...

...Lebel is played by Michel Lonsdale, the Englishman who became an archetypal French actor in the films of Truffaut, Malle and others...

...The acting is rather cartoonish on the whole, especially that of Madeline Kahn and Burton Gilliam...

...If The Last Picture Show was Bogdanovich's King's Row, and What's Up, Doc...

...The acting is impressively smooth throughout from a Franco-British cast whose accents do not always make sense, but whose acting always makes up for this...

...The Day of the Jackal, Fred Zinnemann's thriller, based on Frederick Forsyth's best seller about an attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle, is much better than I expected...

...That, of course, is oversimplification...

...The film is, in other words, as nearly like a documentary as a story film can be...

...our fan-turned-filmmaker has ingested enough Hollywood trivia to be able to cough up artful syntheses of scenes from scores of movies, some known to most of us, and some that only an Andrew Sarris could extract from his own comparable grab bag...

...For claptrap it is...

...He is an elegant, cold, unshowily efficient professional, with a multitude of skills but no supernatural powers, who goes about his work in the most businesslike manner...

...But getting him deeply involved with Trixie Delight gives Bogdanovich and his scenarist, Alvin Sargent, a chance to show off Addie as a mini-Machiavel, which is too good to miss even if it is too good to be true...

...I especially enjoyed Alan Badel, Tony Britton, Michel Auclair, Olga Georges-Picot, Cyril Kusack and Delphine Seyrig...

...Its only flaws are the improbabilities, impossibilities and occasional unexplained bits that always dog this genre...

...Still, there is no getting away from the fact that when the outcome is foreknown (as also in State of Siege), this kind of movie incurs a loss...

...For the only thing that could absolve the film entirely from the need for conventional suspense would be art—something the movie neither has nor, fortunately, pretends to...

...his Bringing Up Baby, Paper Moon is, as Vincent Canby correctly diagnosed, his Little Miss Maiker...

...The black-and-white cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs has its moments of truth, but also others that are patently showy—such as a picnic by a solitary, stunted tree...

...Lonsdale's is the only less than perfect performance, a trifle too studiedly teddy-bearish and rumpled...

...and, finally, the killer himself, operating under the code name Jackal...

...Not a real past that he knew or creatively imagined, but the past of trashy old movies that he religiously lapped up as a buff and now proudly regurgitates as a director...

...More than merely Mose's accomplice, she becomes a strategist, a bailer-out in tight spots, treasure of a treasurer, and moral influence as she jealously breaks up his dalliances with floozies...

...on what little incidents and coincidences life and death—the very fate of nations —may depend...

...The film concerns the efforts in 1963 of an English hired killer paid half a million dollars by the OAS to gun down the General...

...the French governmental, military and police forces, which finally come to depend on Inspector Lebel, the sort of undash-ing French policeman (a figure that goes back to Jouvet in Clouzot's Quai des Orfevres...

...But we are kept involved in the techniques and stratagems that the several parties use: the OAS, led by some not un-clever fanatics...

...For Mose Pray is a fake Bible salesman (his favorite among many petty larcenies) extorting modest sums from the newly bereaved by a conman's trick...

...A reverse-parental relationship results, not unlike that between Chaplin's Tramp and the Kid, and there is hardly a parent or kid in the audience whose emotions are not preyed on by this claptrap...

...Photographed in no-nonsense colors by Jean Tournier, and edited at a lively but unrushed pace by Ralph Kemplen, it is a civilized and thought-provoking treatment of a highly uncivilized activity...

...In Paper Moon, however, he is playing it safe...

...Something like that, in fact, happened with his first, unremunerative film, Targets...

...Edward Fox is a fitting Jackal: not too charming, sinister, brutish or urbane, but enough of all of these, and consistently cool and lucid...

...There is no suspense of the ordinary kind, for we know that de Gaulle was not killed...

...The complaint that this film lacks Hitchcockian wit seems to me irrelevant, for it capitalizes on something else...

...Still, much of the film is persuasive and all of the 142 minutes hold the interest...

...We are allowed to witness and speculate upon the way the greatest cleverness is often less important than sheer good or bad luck...

...or to views of Grapes of Wrath-Yike Okies struggling grimly along desolate, dusty roads...

...heard for the first time in English, he makes one wonder whether that slight French accent is put on or, by now, inescapable...