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Three Days of the Condor Customer Reviews (28 - 30 of 44 Reviews)

Pollack and Redford Combine
Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford combine their talents for this impressive suspense film. Robert Redford plays a reader for the CIA and gets lucky one day. He then has to piece together a rather complicated puzzle. This movie unravels its secrets slowly and surely, leaving the audience stuck within it's web. Other movies nowadays like to spring it all on quick and thick, not so with this film. It piles twist upon twist, and the plot doesn't seem contrived or pre-destined to get to the big revelation, common in most suspense films. It flows wonderously and smoothly. The characters are believable and real, not caricatures or superhuman action heroes. It remains a favorite of mine after watching it years ago, and that is a testament to its staying power. A truly impressive film.

GREAT FILM, UNIMPRESIVE POLITICAL VIEWS
Robert Redford made a clunker called "The Way We Were" with Barbra Streisand that desperately tried to explain, apologize for, justify, glorify and approve of being an American Communist during McCarthyism, but just plain fails. He made the 1973 classic "Three Days of the Condor" (1973), with Cliff Robertson and Faye Dunnaway. He plays a CIA reader, a kind of pre-Tom Clancy research guy, a benign fellow among other benign CIA fellows, all of whom are murdered in a fuzzily explained hit by bad CIA fellows. After escaping, Redford tries to get to the bottom of it. Since he is a genius he has the intellectual tools to outwit his chasers. This is the film's highlight, revolving around the sexual tension between Redford and the redoubtable Faye, who he "kidnaps" in order to have a place to hide out, her apartment. The movie goes off the deep when the whole conspiracy turns out to be about the CIA's covert operations in the Middle East, where the U.S. apparently is planning the invasion (that never actually occurred) to take over OPEC. The message is that The Company murders innocents, the U.S. is a warmongering empire, and tool of capitalist greed. It is Redford's answer to Guatemala, Iran and Chile, where the people killed were generally Communists. Redford would rather show the CIA killing Chinese- and African-Americans and other non-threats.

STEVEN TRAVERS
AUTHOR OF "BARRY BONDS: BASEBALL'S SUPERMAN"
STWRITES@AOL.COM

Candor about "Condor"
Released the year after Watergate, this was among the first of the "paranoid thriller" films involving conspiracies, rogue CIA agents, and whatnot. While it probably seemed groundbreaking and fresh in 1975, three decades of similarly plotted movies have dulled Condor's edge.

Robert Redford plays an agent, code name "Condor," who works in a scholarly-appearing CIA front organization in New York that analyzes world literature for significant patterns (whose significance to the spook agency isn't spelled out very convincingly). While he goes to the deli to pick up lunch for his crew, a team of assassins gains entry to the office and wipes out all of his colleagues there, as well as another who is at home. Redford, realizing he was supposed to be among the victims, goes on the run and plays cat-and-mouse with various CIA officers, any of whom could be behind the killings.

He chooses at random a woman photographer (Faye Dunaway) as his unwilling accomplice while hiding and trying to penetrate the evil cabal within the "Company." In one of the screen's unlikeliest romances, Dunaway finds her fear and distrust of Redford's character yielding to belief in his story and then a dangerous liaison with him.

The director, Sydney Pollack, has often blended the elements of commercial cinema with intelligence and taste (e.g., Out of Africa). This is another such attempt, but not one of his better efforts. The genre has worn thin, as noted earlier, and the script staggers from cliche to cliche. I won't be giving away anything important if I tell you that the denouement is, yes, "It's all about ... oil!"

I am usually unable to warm to Redford, and this was no exception. There is no "there" there, as Gertrude Stein said about Oakland. He strikes poses and lets his golden hair do his acting for him. There is also a featured (but minor) role for John Houseman as a sour, cold-eyed case officer. He lays it on thick.

Still, several of the performances give Condor what distinction it has. Dunaway is better than I would have expected, quite credible and sometimes touching as a lonely introvert. Cliff Robertson, one of the underestimated actors of the '60s and early '70s (what ever happened to him?), is strong as the CIA officer assigned to "bring in" Condor. Best of all is the great Max von Sydow, who starred in many of Ingmar Bergman's films, playing a freelance assassin. Watch how a master actor makes a meal out of a feebly written part.

Several scenes were shot outside and inside the World Trade Center, which was then brand new. They are chilling in a way the filmmakers could not have conceived.

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