Three Days of Condor




Today it rained.

Paranoia. Robert Redford. The 70's.

So Joe (Robert Redford) is an average guy just chilling one day, just like any other day. But when he comes back from lunch, he discovers that the place he works at has been hit for "maximum damage." See, he works for the CIA, reading every book ever published for information, and isn't exactly a field agent. So he's naturally a little scared, a little angry, and a little lost when he gets thrown into a pit of intelligence hanky panky, where everyone and their mother wants him dead. Luckily, he'll eventually bump into Kathy (Faye Dunaway), a random woman off the street that may be willing to help him. Maybe.

It's interesting to trace how many spy thrillers over the last thirty years have borrowed, in varying amounts, from this. The most obvious instance is Robert Ludlum's Bourne trilogy, which are now motion pictures. And it is certainly a premise worth borrowing from. Trying not to give too much away, the beginning is made of sheer awesomeness. And it's cool because Joe, codenamed Condor, doesn't know what he's doing, and only barely misses biting the bullet thanks to what little he knows from books and a healthy dose of luck. Of course that doesn't last long and he eventually becomes an uber spy, but it's nice while it lasts. This takes place in an era before computers (real ones at least) and all the high tech gadgets that other spy flicks like 007 have made so stale, so it has a foot up in that category. In other words, Sydney Pollack makes things work really good, but only for a while. There's real tension in the beginning, but it slowly evaporates as things bog down with the diluting of the premise; the same goes for Joe's relationship to Kathy. The message/moral, however, about government conspiracies taking out the little man in order to benefit the big man, especially with oil and all that, still rings all too true today.

The cast has no want for star power, at least for that time. Redford does his thing, and no fault can be found in his performance. It's good, though never really outstanding. Faye Dunaway looks even more beautiful than usual, and she fits her character's trapped, angry position perfectly, though she becomes much less interesting when all that abates. Cliff Robertson does a good job of the good/bad CIA head honcho (especially with the inevitable justifying) and Max von Sydow does an excellent assassin, dead professional all the way down to the mustache.

Three Days of Condor is great at delivering, but not so much at following through. But it still ends up as an interesting post-Watergate spy flick.



-The Gnome