Three Days of the Condor

Another recent rental from the video store. I must admit, despite the incredibly solid reputation of this movie, and my love of taut political thrillers, I have never seen this movie. Yes, yes, I know...I claim to possess a vast amount of film knowledge, and yet there are massive gaps. The collected works of Sydney Pollack? That's one of the gaps.

And now I'm starting to remember why.



Sydney Pollack makes well-respected, venerable, immensely popular mainstream entertainments. They connect with mass audiences to an impressive degree, and several hold a spot in the canon among America's Greatest Films. Movies like Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, Tootsie, Out of Africa and Three Days of the Condor. They're all professionally made, with high production values and classy ensemble casts. And they all kind of rub me the wrong way. I can appreciate the skill with which they're made, but they feel more like efficient diversions than Great Films.

Three Days of the Condor fits perfectly into this model. Pollack relates his story of a low-level CIA "book reader" who finds himself adrift when his entire team is taken out by a mysterious hit squad with ease and, as I said, efficiency. No time is wasted introducing us to Robert Redford as Joe Turner and his team. They work in secret, skimming through thousands of books published all over the world. It's not ever made entirely clear what they're looking for in these books. Perhaps a case of an author stumbling upon a real-life CIA scheme intermingled with the fiction? Perhaps a good idea for a future scheme?

Anyway, Joe goes out for lunch, and returns to find his entire team has been murdered by a hit squad, headed up by Nordic dynamo Max von Sydow. And, just like that, his entire world comes crashing down. A quick phone call to Langely, Virginia reveals that the CIA will be of little assistance to Joe. He's on his own, with no way to know whom to trust. In a panic, he kidnaps photographer Kathy Hale (another great performance from the oddly beautiful Faye Dunaway).

And this is where the movie begins to lose its way. Up until this point, I admired greatly the simplicity of Pollack's storytelling. This is not some convoluted 70's thriller with absurd camera angles and hysterical conspiracy-mongering. I love The Parallax View, but that's a film about style more than tense, terse storytelling. But once the Faye Dunaway character's introduced, the movie shifts gears, becoming a rather silly, awkward romance, and the tension never really returns.

Perhaps it's the lack of believability inherent in the film's brief, intense courtship scenes. We're asked to accept that, within 24 hours, Joe will kidnap and violently threaten a woman, convince her that he's a rogue CIA operative with a league of goons out to kill him, seduce her into sleeping with him, and finally, gain her assistance in a madcap plan to foil his bosses. Um, sure.

If this were an outlandish fantasy film, playing with ideas about spies and espionage in a James Bond vein, I could accept this sort of whirlwind romantic storyline. But Condor is in all other ways a realistic (and dark) spy thriller. The opening action sequence, in which an entire office building dies in a hail of gunfire, provides the film with a gritty immediacy. To then make it into a dewy love story about a sexy spy on the run cheapens the effect, and decimates the steely intensity the film by all rights should have.

The Max von Sydow character is clearly the best thing in this movie, and by the end, I found myself wishing he had been the focus rather than Redford. He has a brief monologue near the film's conclusion (after he's switched sides) about life as a mercenary, without allegiances, that's wonderfully well-written and performed. There's such a gravitas to his character - Redford's playing a spy, but Von Sydow feels like a spy, like someone born into this life. It's a marvelous performance.

Usually, Redford's an actor I greatly admire, and though my roommate Nathan commented that he's poorly cast as a professional book-reader, I didn't have a problem buying into him. But he never really finds the key to Joe Turner. Like his name, the character's a bit generic. Pollack explores his transformation from naive newbie to seasoned spymaster only on the surface, never in an emotional way, preferring to spend his time on soft-focus love scenes.

I can see why people remember Three Days of the Condor fondly. For one, it inspired an entire generation of spy films, from Redford's own Sneakers and Spy Game to Matt Damon's Bourne films. Additionally, it's got a solid cast and a few clever twists and turnabouts. And cinematographer Owen Roizman, as always, does stand-out work. He was in the midst of building a tremendous resume when Condor came out in 1975. Check out the other films Roizman shot during this time:

The French Connection, Play it Again Sam, The Heartbreak Kid, The Exorcist, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Network

Wow. This guy is good.

So, yeah, Condor is a nice film that I'm glad I've finally seen. But it's somewhat undeserving of the massive praise heaped on it by now two generations of film fans. Of course, I feel this way about Pollack's Tootsie as well, and most people love that movie, so what do I know?