A semi-remake was made under the name The Jackal (1997) with Bruce Willis as the title character (hired by a Russian mobster to assassinate a high-ranking American official), Sidney Poitier as the FBI official in charge of the case and Richard Gere as an IRA sniper sent to stop the assassin.

The semi-documentary style director Fred Zinnemann used to tell this story was often successfully employed in crime and international-intrigue thrillers, such as The House on 92nd Street (1945), The Naked City (1948) and Operation Manhunt (1954). Zinnemann himself employed the style to varying degrees in other films, notably his directorial debut Menschen am Sonntag (1930), The Seventh Cross (1944) and The Search (1948). Although not strictly "documentary" in style, Zinnemann's film High Noon (1952) bears marks of this method in the way it unfolds in a "real time" narrative.

Zinnemann's realistic, semi-documentary style owes much to the great documentarist Robert Flaherty, who Zinnemann called "probably the greatest single influence on my work as a filmmaker." Among Flaherty's many acclaimed documentaries were Nanook of the North (1922), Tabu (1931), Man of Aran (1934) and Louisiana Story (1948).

Zinnemann faced a similar challenge to creating suspense in his early feature Kid Glove Killer (1942). In that picture, the audience knew the killer's identity from the start and the suspense had to come from watching him methodically tracked down.

Assassination plots involving real-life political leaders are the focal points of such films as Nine Hours to Rama (1963, Gandhi), Executive Action (1973, JFK) and JFK (1991). Fictional stories of high-level political assassinations are also the basis of many films, among them The Man Who Knew Too Much (both the 1934 & 1956 versions by Alfred Hitchcock), Suddenly (1954), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Hour of the Assassin (1987), In the Line of Fire (1993) and Nick of Time (1995).

Alan Badel, who plays the Minister overseeing the effort to stop De Gaulle's assassination in The Day of the Jackal, plays a man plotting to kill the Prime Minister of a Middle Eastern country in the Gregory Peck thriller Arabesque (1966).

In The Films of Fred Zinnemann: Critical Perspectives (State University of New York Press, 1999), Lloyd Michaels points out that the suspense and threat of gruesome, anonymous murder in The Day of the Jackal is heightened by our awareness of the most famous assassination footage of all time, the Abraham Zapruder home movie of John F. Kennedy's 1963 murder. Michaels likens the image of the shot to Kennedy's head in the Zapruder film to the scene where The Jackal target practices on a dangling melon that explodes into shards of flesh and red pulp,

Frederick Forsyth's international thriller novels have been adapted several times to the screen, notably The Odessa File (1974), The Dogs of War (1981) and The Fourth Protocol (1987).

by Rob Nixon