Tom Salinsky

My eye was caught by the new glossy Day of the Jackal with Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch but I felt the need to watch the earlier versions first. The 1973 original  with Edward Fox is absolutely brilliant, with Fox’s icy charm perfectly evoking Frederick Forsyth’s meticulous assassin. Ranged against him is pretty much every British male character actor who graduated since the turn of the century, and a few European ones as well, notably Michael Lonsdale who’d go on to be one of James Bond’s most impressive opponents (albeit in a film which few people rate highly).

What’s especially fascinating about this version is how stripped down it is. Fox is going to bump off Charles de Gaulle. Lonsdale has to stop him. There are no subplots, there are no detours, and very notably nobody gets in Lonsdale’s way. He gets every scrap of support available to him, through official and unofficial channels, nobody tells him he’s “on thin ice”, or “he’s becoming obsessed” or he’s got “48 hours to wrap this thing up.” And even with that, he only just manages to stop Fox in time – Fox even manages to get a shot off but misses. So far from robbing us of tension, this lean, streamlined approach makes the Jackal seem like a far more formidable foe.

The plot was revisited in 1997 with Michael Caton-Jones behind the camera, replacing Fred Zinnemann, Bruce Willis slightly miscast as the Jackal and Richard Gere hopelessly miscast as ex-IRA sniper Declan Mulqueen. All the hysterical personal dramas I didn’t miss in 1973 are back here and this is pretty much all by-the-numbers nineties thriller cliches which would have gone straight to DVD if it hadn’t been for the star power of the cast. One famous scene in which Willis offs a young Jack Black is the only noteworthy thing. Forsyth hated it and it was just called “The Jackal” to acknowledge that this wasn’t really much to do with his novel.

And now we have a ten part series which moves the action to the present day, moves the target to a Musk style tech billionaire and greatly expands the narrative. Redmayne finds a deep seam of ruthlessness which is rather disturbing and Lynch – who I wasn’t convinced by in No Time to Die but who I thought was amazing in Matilda – is stunning as Bianca, by turns friend to the fallen, hard-bitten meeting room warrior, and bad ass machine gun toting bitch. Expanding such a slender storyline comes with risks, but the 1973 film exemplifies the motto “audiences love how” and the new team, led by showrunner Ronan Bennett have taken that to heart, with a whole other mission for the Jackal which is just as thrilling as the main hit, a subplot which digs into the Jackal’s own emotions without undermining his impact as a force for evil, and a surprisingly open-ended conclusion. Recommended.

Also coming at the tale end of a series of iterations of the same narrative comes Wicked Part One – the musical film of the stage musical of the novel inspired by the musical film of the novel. I adore the 1939 Judy Garland film and sat down to watch the musical with some trepidation, but I greatly appreciated the cleverness of the story as well as the soaring songs. Now Jon M Chu (In the Heights) has directed a movie version which takes about as long as the stage show without the interval to deliver just the fast half of the story – but fuck me I’ve never had 160 minutes whip by so quickly.

All of the the things which are assumed to have taken place off-stage, all the gaps we the audience have to fill in between the songs, all the emotional beats which aren’t quite fully illuminated come into crisp sharp focus here, and those amazing songs land perfectly, thanks to the gorgeous staging, perfect pacing and astonishing lead performances from Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande-Butera. Shout out too to the hilarious Jonathan Bailey who has a damn good go at stealing a film which the two star already have completely locked down.

And I just have time to mention that I’ve now finished watching the first series of Blake’s 7 thanks to the recently released Blu-ray box set. I have only vague memories of watching this when it was first on, chiefly involving Paul Darrow swaggering around in a slightly absurd fashion. In this first series, his calculating, self-centred Avon makes the perfect foil for Gareth Thomas’s passionate and idealistic Blake, and the best episodes combine wonderful character work with tight plotting and a real attempt to summon up a science fiction world. Yes, there is a lot of plastic and tinfoil in the sets and costumes, no not all the guest cast are up to snuff, but I was absolutely engrossed for all 13 episodes nevertheless.