Three Days of the Condor **** (1975, Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Max Von Sydow, Cliff Robertson) – Classic Movie Review 1154

Director Sydney Pollack’s sizzling 1975 suspense classic thriller offers an eagerly taken perfect role for Robert Redford as Joseph Turner, an innocent bookish CIA researcher on the run from the evil Joubert (Max Von Sydow) after his clandestine offices in New York City are totally wiped out and all his six co-workers left dead in a raid by a group of armed killers and he narrowly escapes with his life.

A mild-mannered researcher paid to read books, newspapers and magazines, looking for hidden meanings and new ideas, Joseph Turner (code name Condor) returns from lunch to find all of his colleagues assassinated. He legs it, escapes an attempt to kill him and hides away in the Brooklyn Heights apartment of Kathy Hale (played by the charismatic Faye Dunaway), a woman he sees randomly in a ski shop.

He holds her prisoner till over time they become lovers. But his hiding place is discovered after Joubert spots him driving her car and a hitman shows up at the apartment. Soon everyone he trusted is trying to kill him, so Condor must find out who did the killings and then come in from the cold before the pursuing hitmen get him.

Redford’s frequent collaborator Pollack delivers a gripping, intelligent, fast-moving Hitchcock-style conspiracy thriller, which offers excellent roles for the stars plus Von Sydow (making a chilling villain), John Houseman (as Mr Wabash) and Cliff Robertson (as Higgins). Its political paranoia conspiracy ideas are very much in the vein of the previous year’s The Parallax View, also co-scripted by Lorenzo Semple Jnr and anticipate Alan J Pakula’s Watergate thriller All the President’s Men the following year, also with Redford.

Three Days of the Condor is mostly very urgent and pacy, but seems just a little bit overlong at 118 minutes: as it was adapted from James Grady’s novel Six Days of the Condor, the runtime could be shorter than its present one.

Under fire for his film being ‘political propaganda’, liberally minded Pollack said: ‘I didn’t want this picture to be judged. It’s a movie. I intended it always as a movie. I never had any pretensions about the picture and it’s making me very angry that I’m getting pretensions stuck on me like tails on a donkey. If I wanted to be pretentious, I’d take the CIA seal and advertise this movie and really take advantage of the headlines.’

Lorenzo Semple Jnr died from natural causes at his home in Los Angeles, on March 28 2014, aged 91. He is known for his work on Papillon (1973),  Three Days of the Condor, The Drowning Pool, King Kong, Flash Gordon (1980) and Never Say Never Again (1983). He wrote the pilot episode for the 60s Batman TV series, and served as story editor, as well as the 1966 Batman feature film.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 1154

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/