Day of the Jackal: passport games
Aug. 18th, 2012 11:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerRe-watching this old favourite (both as a book and a film with Edward Fox, Michel Auclair, and Derek Jacobi). I have to go back and check if the book had a better explanation but I think I've detected a flaw in the complicated passport game that the central character engages in.
The killer switches identities partway through his stay in France, abandoning the English passport he entered under (not his own--a genuine passport but acquired using the birth certificate of someone who had died a few years after birth) and using a Danish passport he stole from a traveler in London, whose appearance he has prepared to mimic.
But if he entered France on his English passport, when the gendarmes examine his Danish passport (which one does almost immediately after he assumes the new identity, when he enters a train station to board a train), they would see that it has no French entry visa, only a British one (with no exit stamp*).
Remember, this was written in 1971 an d filned in 1973, The Schengen Agreement wasn't signed until 1985, and it wasn't implemented, even in part, until nearly ten yearts later. There were already waivers for border crossing between and among some countries (Britain and Eire, Benelux, the Nordic countries), but no such agreement existed between France and Denmark. In fact, the French police are alerted to the character's original entry to France when he shows his English passport at the border crossing at Ventimiglia, on the Franco-Italian border.**
So he should have been nabbed right away. Curious oversight.
*The British police had already found his real (?) passport in his home in England and deduced that he had left the Dominican Republic (which the script inadvertantly has one officer refer to as "Dominica"--not the same thing!) coverty; because there is no exit stamp.
** This is only one of several places in the security aspects of the story where one sees the effect of (the absence of) today's technology. The name and number of the English passport is not sent to the border posts in time for the killer to be stopped at the border, only identified afterwards, even though the investigators in Paris have discovered his false English identity before he leaves Italy. Likewise, when he chacks into a hotel using his false English identity, the hotel registers his passport number, but this is recorded on a card that is picked up daily by the gendarmerie by hand and then transferred by dispatch rider to the district headquarters before being checked against a list by anyone. In today's electronic world, that kind of time lag would be remarkable. Oh, and same for the delay they have to go through to get copies of photos from one counttry's police to another.
The killer switches identities partway through his stay in France, abandoning the English passport he entered under (not his own--a genuine passport but acquired using the birth certificate of someone who had died a few years after birth) and using a Danish passport he stole from a traveler in London, whose appearance he has prepared to mimic.
But if he entered France on his English passport, when the gendarmes examine his Danish passport (which one does almost immediately after he assumes the new identity, when he enters a train station to board a train), they would see that it has no French entry visa, only a British one (with no exit stamp*).
Remember, this was written in 1971 an d filned in 1973, The Schengen Agreement wasn't signed until 1985, and it wasn't implemented, even in part, until nearly ten yearts later. There were already waivers for border crossing between and among some countries (Britain and Eire, Benelux, the Nordic countries), but no such agreement existed between France and Denmark. In fact, the French police are alerted to the character's original entry to France when he shows his English passport at the border crossing at Ventimiglia, on the Franco-Italian border.**
So he should have been nabbed right away. Curious oversight.
*The British police had already found his real (?) passport in his home in England and deduced that he had left the Dominican Republic (which the script inadvertantly has one officer refer to as "Dominica"--not the same thing!) coverty; because there is no exit stamp.
** This is only one of several places in the security aspects of the story where one sees the effect of (the absence of) today's technology. The name and number of the English passport is not sent to the border posts in time for the killer to be stopped at the border, only identified afterwards, even though the investigators in Paris have discovered his false English identity before he leaves Italy. Likewise, when he chacks into a hotel using his false English identity, the hotel registers his passport number, but this is recorded on a card that is picked up daily by the gendarmerie by hand and then transferred by dispatch rider to the district headquarters before being checked against a list by anyone. In today's electronic world, that kind of time lag would be remarkable. Oh, and same for the delay they have to go through to get copies of photos from one counttry's police to another.
