Name the reference.
Hint: It’s from a movie and (I think) a book.
Another hint: crutch
Next hint: a blue Alfa Romeo
Day of the Jackal?
You da man!
What was the giveaway?
I figured it was either Day of the Jackal or Night of the Lepus.
I don’t know the Lepus movie.
After “Kleist” just came to mind for no reason I can recall, I knew it had to do with the guy they tortured and the hotel they met in, but I became concerned that the word he screamed out in torture may have been “chacal” and not “Kleist.”
DOTJ is one of my all-time favorites of the genre. Hasn’t been topped yet. And it holds up so well!
Dammit, I knew that rang a bell. I loved that book…weirdly, my swingin’ groovy elementary school librarian loaned me that when I was 11. I assume nowadays that would get her dismissed.
Johnny, you devil! I just now caught the joke! Day of ___ vs. Night of _____!
The clips remind me of the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!
No doubt! And fodder for Entertainment Tonight and the other tabloids.
Did you get into the plot at 11? I was grown and was spellbound by the pace of the book. One of the very few movies faithful to the feel of the book.
Can you clear up Kleist vs. Chacal as what the guy screamed out?
I totally got into the plot, except there was a sex scene that vaguely puzzled me (a specific phrase stuck in my head involving a nightie and a breeze, but I’m not going to repeat it here because I may have it totally wrong). I never saw the movie, though. If Netflix streamed it (they don’t) I’d watch it right now.
I can’t, and apparently I didn’t keep my copy of the book. It’s the pension he stayed in, right? It’s funny that stuck in your head…for years* ici chacal* and* ici varmy* (valmy?) from a phone conversation occurred to me randomly.
It’s been a while since I saw the movie and decades since the book. So I’m traveling on memory here. Memory of the movie, that is.
Kleist was a hotel in Austria (perhaps) where The Jackal meets with the French conspirators to discuss the feasibility and the costs of the operation. That was to be their only meeting in the flesh with all future arrangements and news to be handled via phone.
The French cops, military or intelligence guys (I forget which) surveil some of the suspect conspirators and manage to capture the Polish officer acting as courier on his way to or from a mail drop.
Under torture of a rather grave type, and recorded on tape, the officer screams out some word that the main investigator later figures out by multiple rewinds of the tape. It’s either “kleist” for the hotel or “chacal” (jackal) which was all the officer ever heard of the Jackal’s name or ID. Later the French investigator (or one of his connections in the intelligence community) pieces together that “chacal” might be the name CHArles CALthrop who was on their list of suspected assassins with previous activites in the Caribbean.
That’s all I have in the way of memory of it.
Why “Kleist” came to mind today is a mystery. It may have been something I read here, but it feels more like one of those random “things in my ear” that come to me now and then.
Close. The French security services know through surveillance who the bodyguards are. Without going into the backstory, the intelligence service lures one of them away from the hotel then grabs him, takes him to an exceedingly grim prison and questions him under torture. He reveals the name of the hotel where the bigwigs were staying when they met the assassin (Pension Kleist), and the code name of the assassin (chacal/jackal). It is not at first recognized that chacal is the assassin’s code name. The torturers think that it is simply an insult that the bodyguard is aiming at them. When it gets back to the bigwigs that the police services know the code name, one of them realizes that it was he who carelessly let drop this tidbit in the hearing of the one bodyguard who later got kidnapped and questioned.
Thanks a lot, LouiseE. Do you remember if there was some other word he screamed out and they were able to figure out from an almost inaudible grunt at the end of the scream? That part is as clear to me as another aspect of the interrogation and the tape analysis afterward, but the word itself is not so clear.
How did you explain the ending, with Calthrop not being possible as the Jackal’s identity?
Disclosure: my knowledge is from the book. In the book there is no screaming. The bodyguard is in pretty bad shape, having been tortured at length. He is incoherent and mumbling. The senior intelligence guy reads through the transcript and finds part of it confusing, so sends for the raw tapes. Based on them he learns about Pension Kleist, realizes that chacal/jackal is the code name of the assassin and crucially amends the assassin’s physical description.
That using good but incomplete data they had made plausible deductions which pointed to Calthrop, which turned out to be wrong. If you remember, they eventually found the assassin through a completely separate data trail, the stolen passports. They assumed these data trails would converge, ie, that the missing man Calthrop was the same as the assassin. At the very end they realize the trails don’t converge, they have unarguably found and killed the assassin and just as unarguably he is not Calthrop. He is some other guy they did not previously know about.
Thanks for your help, LouiseE. That’s pretty much all I could figure about the ending. Blind luck as much as anything. DeGaulle was just a lucky guy! Too bad he got JFK’s share!
I thought you were talking about the weather girl on Channel 2.
Forsyth reuses the “Kleist” name for a minor character in the third novella in his quite good novella collection, “The Deceiver.”
This Kleist character also dies after massive torture