Turner\u2019s story was first told by James Grady in his novel Six Days of the Condor<\/em>; they really do have to streamline these things when they make them into movies, and thus we have the 1975 thriller Three Days of the Condor<\/em> <\/strong>(new this week to the Criterion Channel, streaming for a while now on Amazon Prime<\/a>). The genius of the story, both as told by Grady and by the screenwriters Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Rayfiel, is how its genuine danger and urgency means that Turner \u2013 played here by Robert Redford \u2013 doesn\u2019t have much of a learning curve. He has to improvise, clumsily grabbing a gun as he flees the bloodbath, and doing\u2026 well, what exactly? (Act like the spies in books he\u2019s read and movie\u2019s he\u2019s seen, most likely).<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is A Girl, of course; there always is. Her name is Kathy, and she\u2019s a photographer (Faye Dunaway plays her, and would star as another New York photographer three years later, in Irvin Kershner\u2019s Eyes of Laura Mars<\/em>). Because they meet when Turner takes her hostage, and their initial interactions are charged with the potential for sexual violence, the byplay between them plays quite differently through a contemporary lens. The transition from that dynamic to one of trust and intimacy is tough to pull off, and they don\u2019t quite land it, though the It\u2019s A Wonderful Life\u00ad<\/em>-style \u201cphone call from a would-be boyfriend\u201d scene is a wise effort. (Two-plus decades later, Soderbergh\u2019s Out of Sight<\/em> would slyly call out the credibility of that turn \u2013 as a clever way to replicate it.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n However unfortunate the circumstances, it was presumably out of the question for Robert Redford to star in a major motion picture where he didn\u2019t get the girl, no matter how inappropriately. Condor<\/em> is a fascinating vehicle for Redford, particularly from its mid-\u201870s origin point, because it finds him veering from the sort of conventional leading man he was specializing in; this is more the kind of offbeat lead that contemporaries like Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino would customarily take on. There is some attempt, in the early scenes, to cut Redford from the same cloth; he\u2019s a nerd<\/em>, you see, an analyst, riding a bicycle<\/em>. He even wears glasses!<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it doesn\u2019t really take, and it\u2019s temporary anyway; by the end of the picture, he\u2019s lurking undetected in private homes and busy crowds, gun in hand, collar turned up. The \u201cdesk jockey becomes a tough guy\u201d narrative is quite the chestnut, dusted off frequently for cop movies and spy pictures. Yet it nevertheless works here, and much of that is due to Redford\u2019s performance. You may not fully buy that he\u2019s this clumsy bookworm, but the characterization is still convincing \u2013 mostly because he\u2019s so good at the thing a story like this needs most, which is a protagonist who lets you see what he\u2019s thinking. Watch his expression shift from jovial to horrified when he returns from his ill-fated lunch run; marvel at how many scenes involve his character piecing together what\u2019s happening, and puzzling out his next move. The Bourne Identity <\/em>uses a similar playbook, but this isn\u2019t a character suffering from amnesia; it\u2019s one who literally has no idea what the hell he\u2019s doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And he\u2019s up against some difficult characters. The recently departed Max von Sydow (RIP) is the main gunman, and Turner\u2019s primary pursuer; it\u2019s a truly chilling performance, from an actor who never raises his voice or his blood pressure. As Turner\u2019s not-entirely-trustworthy contact in \u201cThe Company,\u201d Cliff Robertson\u2019s inscrutability \u2013 a liability in some of his more conventional roles \u2013 becomes an asset, allowing the character to hide his true motives and allegiances without seeming dodgy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The director is Sidney Pollack, and while the picture is weighed down (as too many of his films are) by a soggy Dave Grusin score, Three Days<\/em> is nonetheless a sharp reminder that Pollack was one hell of a craftsman. There\u2019s a crisp efficiency to the storytelling \u2013 no wasted details, and even the most convoluted plot points are explained satisfactorily \u2013 and a handful of memorable set pieces. My favorite is the quietest, a drawn-out elevator ride in which we know who von Sydow is, but Redford doesn\u2019t (though it\u2019s dawning on him). There\u2019s no music, or push-button close-ups; Pollack just lets us sit in the discomfort of knowing more than the protagonist, which is one definition of truly effective suspense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because of its mid-\u201870s timing, Condor<\/em> is a bit of a contradiction; it\u2019s a slick genre movie, but set in a grimy town. Cinematographer Owen Roizman shot some of the quintessential dirty New York movies, including The French Connection<\/em> and Network<\/em>, so it has the washed-out sleaze of those films, but also indulges in old-school spy movie pleasures like manually plugging into a phone bank, or working through a lengthy call trace. (There\u2019s also something weirdly perfect about the vague yet sinister cover names of The Company\u2019s clandestine organizations: \u201cAmerican Literary Historical Society,\u201d \u201cFive Continents Imports Inc.\u201d etc.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The film\u2019s 1975 release date also means it was produced and released in the immediate aftermath of Watergate, which certainly lent an extra zing to lines like \u201cWhat is it with you people, you think not getting caught in the lie is the same as telling the truth?\u201d That decade saw a boom in a very specific kind of political conspiracy thriller: The Parallax View<\/em> (co-written by Condor<\/em> co-writer Semple), The Conversation, Winter Kills, Executive Action, Blow Out<\/em> (okay, it was 1981, but you know what I mean), and the non-fiction patriarch of the paranoid family, Redford\u2019s All the President\u2019s Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s hard to separate any of those films from the real-life events that lent them an eerie sense of not only possibility but probability, and so the idea of a rogue group within the C.I.A., which might have seemed far-fetched even in Grady\u2019s novel merely a couple of years earlier, was now borne out by the historical record. And thus the final confrontation between Redford and Robertson, which hints at a wild plot to invade the Middle East and the idea of manufacturing political need first and asking permission later, has a ring of discomforting prescience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But as some things stay the same, some things shift in ways we cannot predict. Turner\u2019s big power play at the picture\u2019s conclusion, the ace up his sleeve, is the revelation that he\u2019s turned over evidence and narrative to the New York Times<\/em>, thus ensuring not only his own safety, but a scandal for the organization that nearly killed him. In 1975, and for years after, this must\u2019ve seemed like quite the gotcha. It\u2019s enough to make one nostalgic for an era when a bombshell Times<\/em> report would actually mean something. \u201cThree Days of the Condor\u201d is now streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/a> and Amazon Prime<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cI\u2019m not a field agent,\u201d he insists. \u201cI just read books.\u201d And while that might be true, he\u2019s going to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":13801,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399,1381],"tags":[1431,1422,162],"class_list":["post-13798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","category-movies","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22861,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13798\/revisions\/22861"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/three-days-of-the-condor2-1024x576.jpg\")
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