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Back to the Feature: Three Days of the Condor (1975)

The secret about the clandestine conspiracy at the heart of Three Days of the Condor is that it is barely a conspiracy -and that the United States government was not too far away from just being open about it. Certainly today they’d have no qualms about the American people knowing the depths of their foreign interference, the specific economic interests behind it, and their carelessness over what collateral damage it would cause. It was an innocent age when U.S. institutions cared about the appearance of diplomacy, enough so that they would assassinate anyone threatening to expose it as a lie. Three Days of the Condor could not be made today because it’s world is long extinct.
And also because there isn’t really a Robert Redford among the current crop of Hollywood stars. That is especially apparent to many people now as we reel from the death of one of the great American cinematic legends -not only in front of and behind the screen but as a critical figure in the emergence of the American indie scene through his Sundance Institute and Film Festival, which has drastically shaped movies through the last forty years. As an actor though, he was a bit underrated -his classic good looks always seeming to supersede his reputation, but there was an endearing naturalism to his performance style not very easy to replicate and which is on display in his best films. Three Days of the Condor marks a little bit of a departure, as Redford plays a character not quite so cool or in control -or who certainly wouldn’t be if Redford wasn’t playing the part. His charisma matters -nobody else could get away with what this script allows of him.
He is a bit of a pencil pusher, a math guy (and he has the glasses to prove it) named Joe Turner, who works as an analyst for a discreet CIA office in New York -his code-name is Condor. One day he comes back from lunch to find his whole office -friends and a girlfriend- have been killed under mysterious circumstances, and he proceeds to contact his superiors to figure out what is going on, only to find they are not so trustworthy, and that somebody high up in the organization is trying to have him killed as a last loose end in a devious plot.
Exactly what that plot is and why Joe is being targeted isn’t made clear until late in the movie. It’s something of a North by Northwest situation for the longest time, where Joe can’t understand why anyone is after him, why he is being set up as a scapegoat when people start to die -only he has the tools to investigate. And it is something of a dramatic character shift where a relatively dweeby office drone becomes more of a conventional spy movie hero as things progress -he even loses the glasses and puffs up his collar in that way that was very cool in the 1970s. Director Sydney Pollack -one of Redford’s most frequent collaborators with whom he made both Jeremiah Johnson and The Way We Were- is very aware of Redford’s screen persona and knows how to mold it to fit different kinds of roles that would still showcase his talents. Three Days of the Condor doesn’t do it as well or as explicitly as those prior films -the character just isn’t quite as interesting- but the way Joe’s competency is framed by both the script and aesthetics in a fashion that is almost in relief to Redford’s sex appeal, is noteworthy -and certainly it predicts how Alan Pakula would similarly utilize Redford a year later in All the President’s Men.
Redford’s movie star charms are also weaponized a bit as a buffer for a plotline that is quite problematic, as Joe essentially takes hostage a random woman Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway), using his power as a CIA agent to force her to shelter him from danger in her apartment, thus involving her in the danger against his own life. This of course evolves into the movie’s major romantic premise as the Stockholm Syndrome sets in quite swiftly for Kathy. It’s the fact that she is just some civilian who you have to imagine Joe singled out to some degree because of her attractiveness -were she one of his several espionage contacts there would be barely an issue. What Joe does here is pretty brazenly unethical on several fronts, and gross given the very recent death of his girlfriend Janice (Tina Chen), with whom he seemed to have a healthy relationship. And it is wild the way the movie presents and expects to get away with it because of Redford’s general non-toxic star power.
Once Kathy is a more consensual accomplice, the movie finds its footing again -and you can see the DNA of so many other espionage thrillers in the details of how Joe investigates while evading his still predominantly discreet enemies. Obviously the populist descendant would be Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which lifts a few beats from this movie (and of course features Redford himself), but any movie that pits a man against his government seems to be in some aesthetic senses referencing this film. The phone tracing and the undercover work, the consultation with a dubiously involved inside man -called Higgins here played by Cliff Robertson, and from there the creeping understanding of what is going on and what his role in it was. And it is not always the most engaging material, but Redford is entirely committed, and though I wish the character were a little more defined he is a solid anchor through it all.
The movie doesn’t incorporate many action sequences in the ways typical of other espionage films. There is one beat where an operative tries to assassinate Joe but is unsuccessful. For the most part his adversaries remain in the shadows, in particular a mostly silent lead hitman played by Max von Sydow, who in spite of his brutality appears to be an amoral party in this case. Every so often the film cuts to a board of CIA directors led by John Houseman apparently perplexed by the situation themselves -though intuition tells us one of them is likely the corrupt mastermind, if not the whole organization which is actually perfectly believable.
Ultimately though it doesn’t matter which person orchestrated the attack -what matters instead is the reasoning, and it is where the movie feels quite prescient in terms of its cynicism about the American political climate of foreign relations. What is found is that a supposedly rogue CIA job was undertaken to seize oil fields in the Middle East -likely in Iran or Saudi Arabia- and that it involved a certain degree of regime destabilization. Joe was unlucky enough to accidentally expose it through a meticulous report on an unusual book. That bit feels a touch far-fetched but the notion of this kind of conspiracy designed to hurt other nations while enriching America with their resources, was and is extremely pertinent. This movie came out in the immediate aftermath of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate Scandal -a period of wide disillusionment in American political institutions and a new understanding of America’s imperialist role in the world. Hell, contemporaneous to this movie was all the shit that Henry Kissinger was doing down in South America ensuring the coups in Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina that would do irreparable harm to the people of those countries for decades. And the oil obsession feels very prescient here to the eventual foreign policy priorities of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, complete with the shady tactics that would eventually be exposed from them.
And Pollack seems to understand the inevitability of these, shrouding the movie’s resolution and ending in a haunting atmosphere of the futility of Joe’s efforts. He nabs the right guy and avenges his lost colleagues vicariously through his death at the hands of von Sydow’s assassin, but the conspiracy is not fully dead and Joe’s life may still be at risk. That cryptic conversation with the assassin indicates he might be a loose thread and he would be better laying low perhaps in another country. And Higgins suggests that the oil scheme will take another form, openly laying bare the corruption of this institution and nation that Joe had dedicated so much work to. That it is so pervasive in fact that Joe can’t even rely on his whistleblower piece for the New York Times being published. A harsh and chilling ending for this movie …in 1975. In 2025 it is quaint -for Democrats it is a nostalgic reminder of a more innocent time when the same heinous stuff was happening but the U.S. was invested in the appearance of having values.
The all-American Redford here is a kind of analogue to the U.S. itself losing its innocence in the early 1970s with the revelations of so much corruption. It is a good metaphor and the film itself is pretty good, if not being as compelling as All the President’s Men where it concerns the political climate of the early 70s. The book this film is based on was actually called Six Days of the Condor -Redford getting things done in half the time probably seems fitting. He is a great driver of the movie, even through that kidnapping plot point and in spite of his character being underdeveloped -he still has a powerful leading man charisma. Dunaway unfortunately is underused -this is perhaps the least memorable performance I’ve seen from her, there is never even a resolution to her story. Three Days of the Condor is dated in a couple bad ways -but mostly in good ones. The care and attention in both the story and filmmaking is classic New Hollywood, and few of those movies inspired by it are so smooth. Importantly for the moment it is a good showcase of both Redford himself and the kind of movies that mattered to him in this critical point of cinema history. The kind of artistic tastes and convictions that made him a titan.

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