Review of Three Days of the Condor (1975) by Paul Z — 22 Sep 2009

This, director Sydney Pollack's ninth film, is a well-made thriller, taut and engrossing, and all too persuasive. Conspiracies including murder by federal agencies used to be found in arcane writings of who were deemed extremely radical. Months after Watergate, Three Days of the Condor went from a thrifty page-turner to a classy thriller starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway. How soon we seem to have always become used to the most discouraging contingencies about our governments, and how soon, too, we market them. But back then, we did it better. Now we're just too obvious.

Redford brings a becoming, persevering rigor to his role: He would very much like to survive, so he's got to revise all of his assurances about the CIA. The Edgar-winning script is naturally the thread of how he stays alive and haphazardly unearths a conspiracy within the agency. In the film's weakest element, he's assisted by Faye Dunaway, playing a woman who is the express personification of nerve. He kidnaps her for the sake of using her apartment as a refuge, but something about him, maybe his astonishing likeness to Robert Redford, persuades her that she'd rather help him all the sudden than meet her fiancé on a ski trip.

Pollack continuously unravels the entanglements around Redford's character. It's comprised of business types, and the most disparaging thing about them to be sure is their detachment as they talk about murder and other breakage. One of them is a contract killer, played with uncommon persuasion by the enormously brilliant and powerful Max von Sydow. One is the unexcitable functionary played by chiseled retro star Cliff Robertson. And one, veteran actor John Houseman, is a deranged result of Cold War double-reverse strategy.

This prototypical American political thriller never pushes their several mazelike conspiracies too far. We can believe that the CIA might behave in this way, and that it has. The ending, when it comes and when it's translated with such distressing rationality by von Sydow, has, as von Sydow's voice always does, a fitting pitch. Quite a cynical one at that.