Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Directed by Sydney Pollack
When bookish CIA researcher Joe Turner finds all his co-workers dead, he, together with a woman he has kidnapped, must work together to outwit those responsible until he determines who he can really trust.
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10 films that influenced Three Days of the Condor
What critics say influenced Three Days of the Condor
Not that "Condor" is a "great" film by any means, but it is a competent, well-made one, patterned to some extent on the one-man-against-the-world theme found in some of Hitchcock's best films ("The 39 Steps," "North By Northwest").
Writers Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and David Rayfiel fill it with too much gloss and pilfer much from Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps," but when left to their own devices there's some intelligence evident in the clever dialogue and in the way they present the mundane details about a spook's life in such a cheeky way.
Not that "Condor" is a "great" film by any means, but it is a competent, well-made one, patterned to some extent on the one-man-against-the-world theme found in some of Hitchcock's best films ("The 39 Steps," "North By Northwest").
…olitical thrillers are certainly nothing new – they’ve been a staple of the cinema at least as far back as Hitchcock’s “Notorious” in 1946 – but they really bloomed during the post-Watergate years of the ‘70s, when audiences were not only willing to believe that their government was corrupt at its highest levels, but they were still really bothered by the idea.
Working from a script by The Great Santini writer-director Lewis John Carlino (adapting David Ely's novel), Frankenheimer fashioned a trippy motion picture that was clearly ahead of its time, even if just by a few years (the 1970s would be crammed with post-Watergate paranoia pictures such as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor).
This take on the “transformed” also fuels a paranoid thriller style before the Watergate scandal made it a mainstay in the 1970s (Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, Marathon Man, etc.).
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Basically, the film is a throwback to the 60s anti-Bond spy thriller (a la The Ipcress File), except here the genre's annihilating irony has been replaced by Pollack's liberal piousness.
For a more believable story of political intrigue during this period, see Costa-Gavras' Z or All the President's Men.
The film further benefits from the photography of Owen Roizman (The French Connection, The Exorcist, Network, Tootsie), shrewd leading performances by Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway, and supporting turns by Max von Sydow, Cliff Robertson, and John Houseman.
He never made big, splashy movies that garnered all the attention, but he made popular, well-crafted, often old-fashioned films like "Castle Keep," "Jeremiah Johnson," "The Way We Were," "Bobby Deerfield," "The Electric Horseman," "Absence of Malice," "Tootsie," "Out of Africa," "The Firm," "The Interpreter," and the film under discussion here, "Three Days of the Condor" (1975).
The film's director, Sydney Pollack , has worked with Redford three times before (they made the epic "Jeremiah Johnson" and the considerably less-than-epic " The Way We Were ").
Director Sydney Pollack and star Robert Redford have collaborated for a total of seven films ("This Property is Condemned"/"Out of Africa"/"The Way We Were"/"Jeremiah Johnson"/ "The Electric Horseman"/"They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"/"Havana") and have an excellent working relationship, which results in Redford giving an outstanding performance.
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Director Sydney Pollack and star Robert Redford have collaborated for a total of seven films ("This Property is Condemned"/"Out of Africa"/"The Way We Were"/"Jeremiah Johnson"/ "The Electric Horseman"/"They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"/"Havana") and have an excellent working relationship, which results in Redford giving an outstanding performance.
He never made big, splashy movies that garnered all the attention, but he made popular, well-crafted, often old-fashioned films like "Castle Keep," "Jeremiah Johnson," "The Way We Were," "Bobby Deerfield," "The Electric Horseman," "Absence of Malice," "Tootsie," "Out of Africa," "The Firm," "The Interpreter," and the film under discussion here, "Three Days of the Condor" (1975).
The film's director, Sydney Pollack , has worked with Redford three times before (they made the epic "Jeremiah Johnson" and the considerably less-than-epic " The Way We Were ").
Director Sydney Pollack and star Robert Redford have collaborated for a total of seven films ("This Property is Condemned"/"Out of Africa"/"The Way We Were"/"Jeremiah Johnson"/ "The Electric Horseman"/"They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"/"Havana") and have an excellent working relationship, which results in Redford giving an outstanding performance.