He wrote and directed for British TV and helped found the Free Cinema Group which was instrumental in the careers of filmmakers such as Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz.
[3][4] In the 1960s, he was an assistant to producer David Deutsch on the film Catch Us If You Can (1965) directed by John Boorman and costume designed by Jacobs' wife, Sally.
[5] Boorman later wrote about Jacobs: [He was] my real ally, the one whose opinion I came to depend on for making changes to the script...
He had been a pro cyclist, competed in the Tour de France, and had smashed one side of his face in a bad fall.
[6]Boorman says that one day Dave Clark, the star of the film, said "something insulting" to Sally ("he hated the clothes she made him wear") and Jacobs "flew into a rage.
"[6] Dave Clark was unable to film for three days and Alex Jacobs was banished from the set.
According to one writer, Point Blank was "a major achievement, a reworking of a classic gangster text into an explosive reverie on American alienation and madness.
'There's the germ of a great idea here,' he would say, slapping the script or twisting it in his hands, as though squeezing out that little pip of importance from the hundred or so pages of dross.
We hear menacing grunts and stare in amazement at a grimacing, brutally determined convict "spread eagled across the ceiling like some huge dark spider" as he struggles through this bizarre isometric exercise.
According to his obituary: Too many were perfectly willing to let Alex serve merely as an adaptor, a rescuer of troubled projects, a brain to be picked.
Indeed, he was a constant magnet for people who, weary of the usual obsessive gossip about what's going through the roof and what's bombing this week, wanted good, lively talk about film itself.
They had met in the early years of their respective careers when he was a writer and she a secretary at a film copyright agency in Soho, London.