Pristine, sleek and stylish, “The Day of the Jackal” is a period piece that’s aged into a period piece about a period piece.

Director Fred Zinnemann’s film of Frederick Forsythe’s thriller novel recreates chic early ’60s Euro-travel, wining and dining as the well-heeled managed it. And it does so from the gritty confines of early ’70s cinema.

It’s a brutally efficient assasination story with a “Thomas Crown Affair”/Sean Connery Bond years sheen. Virtually every hired killer tale that’s followed has leaned on it, borrowed from it or just plain stolen plot elements, character traits and the ticking clock formula of the professional-who-must-be-stopped-by-other-professionals narrative.

Edward Fox became the template for assassins from “The Killer” (Chow Yun-Fat) to “The American” (George Clooney), “The Professional” (Jean Reno) and “John Wick” (Keanu Reeves) to “Grosse Pointe Blank” (John Cusack).

Our hunter/killer is a lone wolf, meticulous in his work and perfectly turned-out in a succession of tan suits, ascots ’60s and beltless, polyester pants — “Continentals” they were called. He knows the underworld, where forged passports and custom-built, easily-disassembled and concealed sniper rifles can be commissioned. But he travels in style, with leather luggage that tucks into his just-acquired Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider, perfectly coifed and notably dashing, the sort who of eye candy who can seduce seducable women or gay men at the local Turkish bath, when the need arises.

Zinnemann parks Forsythe’s cold-blooded killer in a lean narrative that takes us from the hire to the prep to the hunt for a man the French have figured out has been hired by traitors to shoot President Charles de Gaulle.

Some French military men turned on de Gaulle for conceding rebellious Algeria’s independence. We see their first attempt to kill him via an ambush of his convoy of black Citroens. The plotters flee, and decide to hire a non-Frenchman, a “professional,” perhaps the man rumored to have gotten away with shooting Trujillo just a couple of years before.

The man (Fox) meets the leaders in Vienna, names his price (“half a million U.S. dollars”), makes a point of fretting over how one kills a highly-protected, high-profile leader in a foreign country and gets away afterwards, and sets protocols for contacting them.

We follow the killer as awaits the Swiss bank deposit and plunges into his prep, from finding an English grave that will give him a new identity to contacting a Genoese forger (Ronald Pickup) and gunsmith (Cyril Cusack) to provide him with the ways and the means.

The French, fretting about what this cell of disgruntled military men might be plotting next, resort to kidnapping and torture to get the barest clues about what’s in the works.

A foreign killer has been hired. “Jackal” appears to be his code name. The interior minister (Alan Badel) puts whole departments of government on this case, including the foreign service. As clues point to an Englishman, assorted Brits (Tony Britton et al) are reluctantly dragged into the hunt.

The French finally call in their best investigator, Lebel (future Bond villain and “Ronin” scene-stealer Michael Lonsdale). The chase is on to catch this guy abroad, trying to sneak into France or already in France if there’s evidence somebody matching his “English” and “fair haired” description has already crossed the border.

The period piece within a period piece nature of the film is underscored in the analog world all this takes place in. No computers, no cell phones, no CCTV cameras, just men digging through archives, prowling cemeteries looking for a child that died within a year or two of his late ’20s birth, passports that can easily be forged, policemen collecting “hotel cards” — a daily ID of everyone staying in a French hotel — for teams of other men to peruse, looking for clues.

The four-time Oscar winning director wasn’t known for thrillers, but Zinnemann impressed in any genre he was hired to film, from musicals (“Oklahoma!”) to romantic dramas (“From Here to Eternity”), melodramas (“A Nun’s Story”) to Westerns (“High Noon”).

“High Noon” is the classic I was thinking about as we see the largely dialogue-free preps our shooter goes through. He accepts the piece-together silenced single-shot bolt-action rifle and the custom-made exploding bullets, takes a suggestion for a place to “test” it, stops to buy a melon and a net bag at a street market and takes his time assembling, adjusting the scope and puncturing that melon until he’s satisfied.

A final shot blows the fruit ball to pieces, a hint of de Gaulle’s fate should this Jackal succeed.

There are women — the honey trap (Olga Georges-Picot) used by conspirators to seduce a gullible old government minister to get inside information about what they know and what they’re doing about it, and a French society doyenne (Delphne Seyrig) the Jackal targets at a hotel and seduces so that he won’t be in his hotel room should authorities close in, and thinking ahead, whose house might provide another bit of cover should he be forced to go on the lam.

Our shooter is always “planning ahead,” picking out his assassination point, packing hair dye into Old Spice bottles and a electric paint sprayer in the trunk should the gendarmes start hunting for a white Alfa Romeo roadster.

The third act, with our shooter aware that he’s been ID’d and still hellbent on finishing the job, is as pulse pounding as an analog-era manhunt gets. Helicopters are deployed to search for the car in the Alpine southeast of France. But mostly this is a world of sleepless men drinking coffee, napping in the office (Derek Jacobi plays Lebel’s trusted assistant), waiting waiting waiting for callbacks or deliveries from foreign capitals via motorcycle courier and springing into action via department propellor planes or vintage Renaults, which always seems to arrive just after their quarry has slipped away. Again.

Only the bureacrats are hustled about in high-end Citroen DS’s, and those — we learn early on — aren’t bullet proof.

“Jackal” has been filmed three times now, once with Bruce Willis hiding his rifle in the boom of a sailboat mast as he sets out to kill an American female politician, most recently with Eddie Redmayne in the title role for a British limited series.

A parade of familiar to semi-familiar British (mostly) and French actors parade by in such a blur that we’re immersed in the dilemma of faceless bureaucracies facing a crisis with too many chiefs and “not enough Indians,” as the old aphorism warned.

The one joke in all these patriot games is a droll British inspector ironically claiming  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a political killer in this country” in the middle of Bond-era Britain. “It’s not our style, is it?”

Fox, who has played his share of villains in his 88 years (like Jacobi, he’s still living), was never icier than here, cold-blooded and vain, cunning and perhaps a tad too sure of himself. Lonsdale looks like a French basset hound, doggedly hunting someone a lot more nimble and seemingly clever enough to be two steps ahead of him at every turn.

This version remains the gold standard not just for this story, but for this genre. It’s one of those thrillers (Frankenheimer’s all-star “Ronin” is another) that I can never channel surf by without watching.

Not that it’s perfect. The plot has a big illogical hole in it as pertains to the Jackal’s English identity.

For a dispassionate “professional,” someone awfully concerned with “The point is getting away with it” — who already has half his fee in hand when his employers tell him he’s “blown” — our Jackal seems hellbent on doing the deed, without giving us a clue that he’s got a workable escape plan from the trap he’s intent on putting himself in.

The French grope around in the dark, settle on “the best investigator” in the country, and then cut him loose when he’s ID’d their killer and that killer is now IN PARIS?

But there’s a dry cleverness in showing us all this Jackal prep and planning and improvising, never letting on about the exact time and place he’s decided is perfect for pulling the trigger. The police, like we, are in the dark and have to put the pieces together and reason all this out.

And because they don’t have smart phones, computerized records and IT support, Lebel’s old school ” I’m beginning to get a feeling about the Jackal” will have to do.

Poirot, Miss Marple, Columbo or Benoit Blanc could not have put it better.

Rating: PG, violence, nudity

Cast: Edward Fox, Michael Lonsdale, Cyril Cusack, Eric Porter, Delphine Seyrig, Michel Auclair, Olga Georges-Picot, Ronald Pickup, Maurice Denham and Derek Jacobi

Credits: Directed by Fred Zimmerman, scripted by Kenneth Ross, based on a novel by Frederick Forsythe. A Universal release streaming on Youtube, Apple TV+, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 2:22