Three Days of the Condor

Three Days of the Condor (1975) begins at a small research office in New York. Joe Turner reads books and writes reports; the office answers to the CIA and nobody quite knows what they are working towards. In the half hour he is out getting lunch, everyone in the office is killed. Turner steps outside and has no idea whom to trust. The tension comes from an asymmetry of knowledge. Turner is a reader, not a trained field officer, and his method of survival is remembering what he has read. Sydney Pollack builds it that way deliberately, leaning on phone lines, finding addresses and the question of who called, rather than on action. The source is James Grady's novel Six Days of the Condor. The film shortens the span to three days and turns the book's drug based conspiracy into one about oil. Its timing shaped how it was read. It came out a year after Watergate and immediately after congressional inquiries into the CIA's domestic activities; audiences were ready to accept that the agency might kill its own people. Robert Redford plays Turner, Faye Dunaway the woman he abducts, and Max von Sydow the contract killer. Von Sydow's character is the most interesting figure in it: he holds no political position, he simply does the work, and he says so plainly. The last scene ends on a question that is never answered. It runs 117 minutes. Good for: seventies conspiracy thrillers, procedural espionage, and New York. Less good for: what Turner does to Dunaway's character is seriously troubling now and the film romanticises it. The pace is slow and there is little action.