Headscratchers / The Day of the Jackal

• What if the Jackal had succeeded?
  • Civil war in France would have followed. The novel mentions that the French nation was in a state of unrest, and killing DeGaulle would have roused the entire country to war with each other, no matter what the OAS could have done.
    • Exactly; the plan was for civil war to break out, which would result in martial law and a right-wing/military government being installed. Besides, even if there isn't a takeover they still will have felt that they have avenged DeGaulle's betrayal of France.
• In the film, did the Jackal and Calthrop both kill Trujillo? The OAS officials say the Jackal killed Trujillo, but later the British government says Calthrop did (and Calthrop's passport shows a Dominican Republic entry stamp).
  • The ending reveals that "Calthrop" was a fake identity the Jackal to enter the Dominican Republic, and after the Trujillo assassination the passport was left planted in the flat of an innocent man named Calthrop.
  • The passport was probably not planted at all. In the film, Thomas' contact says that Calthrop being the assassin was little more than gossip. Calthrop may not have been the assassin at all. He may have actually been in Dominica legitimately as an arms rep and got out "on the sly" after the assassination to avoid the inevitable power vacuum. Not to mention that people finding out you were there trying to sell guns to a dictator wasn't going to get you on anyone's Christmas Card list. It was ultimately a brute-force search for a false passport that got the authorities onto the Jackal's trail. They assumed that because Calthrop left his passport in his flat and was no where to be found — a neighbour said he was likely abroad — that he had to be travelling on a false one. One of the investigators suggested that Calthrop was possibly on vacation within England and therefore didn't need a passport but Thomas couldn't afford to make that assumption.
  • The simplest explanation is that the Jackal stole Calthrop's identity for the Trujillo job, just like he did with other people during the DeGaulle job.
    • That's actually not a simple explanation at all, since it requires the Jackal to have not only stolen but also returned Calthrop's passport. A stolen passport would simply have been dumped in a garbage can or tossed in a fireplace. A replacement passport would not have all those stamps in it, there would be no evidence of being in Dominica at all. The suggestion that Calthrop slipped out of the country after an assassination that someone else pulled is most likely.