Three Days of the Condor (Blu-ray)

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Note: In the following joint Blu-ray review both John and Tim comment on the movie, with John also writing up the Video, Audio, Extras, and Parting Thoughts.

The Film According to John:
"This is no damned book! Somebody or something is rotten in the Company!"

When actor/director/producer Sidney Pollack died in 2008, the industry lost a much-underappreciated filmmaker. He never made big, splashy movies that garnered all the attention, but he made popular, well-crafted, often old-fashioned films like "Castle Keep," "Jeremiah Johnson," "The Way We Were," "Bobby Deerfield," "The Electric Horseman," "Absence of Malice," "Tootsie," "Out of Africa," "The Firm," "The Interpreter," and the film under discussion here, "Three Days of the Condor" (1975).

When critics today talk about great conspiracy films, they're often referring to the golden age of conspiracies, the Seventies, with things like "All the President's Men," "The Conversation," "The Day of the Jackal," "Chinatown," "Marathon Man," "The Parallax View," and, yes, "Three Days of the Condor." It was, after all, the age of Watergate. Not that "Condor" is a "great" film by any means, but it is a competent, well-made one, patterned to some extent on the one-man-against-the-world theme found in some of Hitchcock's best films ("The 39 Steps," "North By Northwest"). And "Condor" has the same superstar in it who would feature so prominently in "All the President's Men" the next year--Robert Redford--so it couldn't go too far wrong.

In "Condor" Redford plays Joe Turner, a happy-go-lucky young CIA research analyst (code name "Condor") in one of the Agency's New York City branches. He's a desk jockey whose job is to read books and papers all day for possible security information. He doesn't carry a gun, he enjoys comic strips, and he has never been a field agent. One day he slips out the office's back door to buy some sandwiches for the staff, and when he returns he finds everybody dead, murdered. This massacre sets up the story's central predicament for Turner, and it's a rather tense one. He doesn't know what to do next except to get out of there as fast as possible and contact the Agency's head office. But he's not sure he can trust even the head office. He doesn't know who ordered the hits or why. Or to whom he can turn or whom he can trust.

Everyone around Turner becomes a potential threat. As he becomes ever more paranoid, so do we as an audience. He is suspicious and jumps at every noise, every shadow. He even distrusts his own Agency boss, as well he might be because when he does report the situation to his Agency head and asks him to bring him in, the very people assigned to pick him up start shooting at him!

"I'm not a field agent. I just read books!"

Of course, it wouldn't be a thriller without a romantic interest. Along the way, Turner forces a complete stranger, a female bystander, Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway), to help him escape by commandeering her car. Will she eventually help him willingly? Can he trust her? Can we trust her? Only time will tell. It's too bad this is also the time the film begins to lose some of its energy and credibility because their relationship is less than convincing. Of more importance, actually, are the two head honchos of the Agency, J. Higgins (Cliff Robertson) and Mr. Wabash (John Houseman), both characters cool and calculating and not a little menacing. Their presence adds a further tension to the proceedings.

But the real stand-out is Max Von Sydow as Mr. Joubert, an unflappably ruthless, cold-blooded assassin assigned to track down Turner and eliminate him. A scene in an elevator with Turner and Joubert is one of the most suspenseful moments in the film.

With no one he can trust, it's up to Turner to evade the Agency, the assassin, and the police and try to solve the mystery of what's going on himself. The plot works reasonably well, and even though, as I've said, we've seen it before, "Three Days of the Condor" does it up more slickly than most, with plausible intrigue in the first half and a more-than-agreeable leading man for whom we feel genuine sympathy.

Although the movie gets a little preachy toward the end, its messages on antisecrecy and anti-covert operations seeming a bit too obvious, it probably struck just the right chord for its time. Today, we take the government's shady, clandestine activities for granted, having read or heard about them so often and for so long. That's OK. The film still makes a dandy suspense yarn, with plenty of twists and turns.

John's film rating: 7/10

The Film According to Tim:
"Three Days of the Condor" is a film I remember watching as a young lad and never quite understanding the overall plot of the film. Even today, I find many films that involve the CIA require the audience to have an impeccable attention span. With all the twists, turns, and political overtones one would expect from a film of this type, it was rather difficult to follow when I was eleven years old. At that time, I found it as difficult to understand as the mumbling schoolteacher in the Charlie Brown comic strips.

Nevertheless, I took to suspenseful, high-action drama films at a young age, thanks to my father. While other fathers were raising their sons on football and baseball games, my father was raising me on spaghetti Westerns, James Bond, and Dirty Harry movies. I have many fond memories of films starring Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, and several other stars of the time as part of a typical Sunday afternoon. "Three Days of the Condor" certainly falls into the repute of films I remember watching with dear-old dad, and naturally not much has changed with my father since those days. He still enjoys films where, well, things blow up. I, on the other hand, continue to enjoy a good action-packed thriller, but my taste in films has grown into an extensive library since the days of my youth.

Many years have past since 1975, and now that I am much older I found "Three Days of the Condor" much easier to digest and follow. However, the characters have a lack of concrete development, leaving many loopholes in the story. At one point, you think you have a character figured out, and then a plot twist comes along and leaves you wondering what purpose the character served. Not to mention, somewhere in the film is the underlying plot, which takes its sweet time revealing itself. I will say the movie does a moderately fair job of keeping one's interest, and it is not a complete waste of time.

What is even more ironic and more chilling in the plot is how the film manages to touch on current events that we are all experiencing in the world today. In fact, if you are one to have emotional problems watching any film with the Twin Towers, then be prepared to see them a substantial number of times throughout the picture. There are even a few scenes directly inside one of the towers, which sent chills down my spine.