Three Days of the Condor. (15.)
Directed by Sydney Pollack. 1975
Starring Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, Max Von Sydow and John Houseman. Released on August 11th by Eureka as part of the Masters of Cinema series. 117 mins.
In the old days, boys and girls, people could run a very respectable conspiracy theory using just the CIA – they didn't have to invent stuff about shape shifting aliens, the Freemasons and the Illuminati. In the 70s, before Star Wars anyway, men in black suits were enough, we didn't need Men In Black. Three Days of The Condor is an example of the paranoid thriller (Parallax View, The Conversation) of which there were a real flurry in the middle of that decade. Strange, I wonder what could've been happening at that time in the American political culture to foster such a mistrust of government and the system? Condor is a very fine example of this as long as it sticks to men talking in terse riddles down phone lines and looking pensive in nondescript offices, with just a smattering of running around and shooting. But they had to spoil it all by putting a woman in it.
Among the extras on the Eureka disc is a short critique of the film by Sheldon Hall, in which he outlines the genesis of the film. It was originally conceived as a vehicle for Warren Beatty, directed by Peter Yates, based on a then unpublished thriller called The Six Days of The Condor, but Beatty vacillated for so long the producer Dino de Laurentis offered it to Redford instead. Redford, an infamous prevaricator himself, jumped at the chance but insisted on getting his favourite director Pollack in, which meant paying off Yates. Pollack came in, decided that he didn't much like the plot so went about changing it, lopping off half the time frame but also by inserting a love interest .
The film has a great opening half hour that really hooks you in. Redford works in this odd little academic office block in New York. Everybody there seems very donnish and educated, like in some University research facility, but there is are computers everywhere and an armed guard downstairs. When questioned about how happy he is in the job, Redford complains that he doesn't like not being able to tell anyone what he does. Then, just as you getting really intrigued about what the office really does, a team of assassins break in and kill everyone – except Redford, who had snuck out to do the lunch run. The killings are striking and unusually distressing not because they are overly violent (not for the mid 70s anyway) but because they are uncommonly callous. The devastation of this insular little community feels gratuitous. The only previous time I saw this film must have been in the early eighties and though the rest of the film had drifted into the grey wilderness, that set up really stuck with me.
The killing reveals the office to be a low level CIA operation and Redford, unable to trust anyone in the Agency, is soon on the run. With no one to turn to, our mild mannered, bookish researcher, decides to kidnap a woman (Dunaway.) Previously he had spent his days in the office, carefully analysing books from around the world, trying to find patterns or allusions to Intelligence activity, feeding the results into the computer and writing up reports; now he is a ruthless man of action. Actually the film presents this transformation quite credibly. The idea that he has read up so much on his subject that he knows most of the skills required of a field agent kind of works. It taps into the dual nature of Redford: though he is face of American progressive liberalism, he has often embodied the more traditional American frontier values of individualism.
What doesn't work though is the relationship with Dunaway. The script insinuates that she is in some way damaged, primarily because she takes black and white photos of empty park benches in winter. The scenes between them are bizarre, flipping between the banal and the edgy. (She has some even bleaker photos that she keeps hidden away – Redford says he'd like to see them some time.) Redford is like a passive aggressive rapist here; not forcing himself on her, because he's Robert Redford and he wouldn't do that, but not giving her many choices. Dunaway more of less goes weak at the knees for him but then makes cutting remarks to cover herself. Both of them are trying to persuade each other, themselves and the audience that they are not that kind of guy/girl. The more they deny it, the more it seems to be a really clumsy attempt to shoehorn in a conventional Hollywood romance into a film that is trying to be something a bit more than a conventional Hollywood flick.
Aside from that the film is an excellent terse, slowburn, wintry, New York thriller. It is complicated enough to make you feel clever for being able to follow it, but straightforward enough to let you follow it even if you aren't. It also knows how much it can leave ambiguous or unexplained, without leaving a mainstream audience feeling short changed. And it is alarmingly prescient – when at the end all is revealed it is chilling to hear how obvious the future was back them.
The cast does some exceptional work: Cliff Robertson is great as a CIA boss (working out of his office in the just opened World Trade Centre) but the outstanding performance is Von Sydow as a calm unruffled hit man. It's the best written role in the film but, even so, he is mesmerising in it. These days you're so used to seeing Von Sydow as a contented bystander in Hollywood movies, it's a really shock to see him when he was still an actor, and a formidable one.
Extras:
Original trailer.
20 minute discussion of the film and Pollack's reputation by film historian Sheldon Hall.
Hour long episode of the series The Directors on Pollack's career.
32 page booklet.
Directed by Sydney Pollack. 1975
Starring Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, Max Von Sydow and John Houseman. Released on August 11th by Eureka as part of the Masters of Cinema series. 117 mins.
In the old days, boys and girls, people could run a very respectable conspiracy theory using just the CIA – they didn't have to invent stuff about shape shifting aliens, the Freemasons and the Illuminati. In the 70s, before Star Wars anyway, men in black suits were enough, we didn't need Men In Black. Three Days of The Condor is an example of the paranoid thriller (Parallax View, The Conversation) of which there were a real flurry in the middle of that decade. Strange, I wonder what could've been happening at that time in the American political culture to foster such a mistrust of government and the system? Condor is a very fine example of this as long as it sticks to men talking in terse riddles down phone lines and looking pensive in nondescript offices, with just a smattering of running around and shooting. But they had to spoil it all by putting a woman in it.
Among the extras on the Eureka disc is a short critique of the film by Sheldon Hall, in which he outlines the genesis of the film. It was originally conceived as a vehicle for Warren Beatty, directed by Peter Yates, based on a then unpublished thriller called The Six Days of The Condor, but Beatty vacillated for so long the producer Dino de Laurentis offered it to Redford instead. Redford, an infamous prevaricator himself, jumped at the chance but insisted on getting his favourite director Pollack in, which meant paying off Yates. Pollack came in, decided that he didn't much like the plot so went about changing it, lopping off half the time frame but also by inserting a love interest .
The film has a great opening half hour that really hooks you in. Redford works in this odd little academic office block in New York. Everybody there seems very donnish and educated, like in some University research facility, but there is are computers everywhere and an armed guard downstairs. When questioned about how happy he is in the job, Redford complains that he doesn't like not being able to tell anyone what he does. Then, just as you getting really intrigued about what the office really does, a team of assassins break in and kill everyone – except Redford, who had snuck out to do the lunch run. The killings are striking and unusually distressing not because they are overly violent (not for the mid 70s anyway) but because they are uncommonly callous. The devastation of this insular little community feels gratuitous. The only previous time I saw this film must have been in the early eighties and though the rest of the film had drifted into the grey wilderness, that set up really stuck with me.
The killing reveals the office to be a low level CIA operation and Redford, unable to trust anyone in the Agency, is soon on the run. With no one to turn to, our mild mannered, bookish researcher, decides to kidnap a woman (Dunaway.) Previously he had spent his days in the office, carefully analysing books from around the world, trying to find patterns or allusions to Intelligence activity, feeding the results into the computer and writing up reports; now he is a ruthless man of action. Actually the film presents this transformation quite credibly. The idea that he has read up so much on his subject that he knows most of the skills required of a field agent kind of works. It taps into the dual nature of Redford: though he is face of American progressive liberalism, he has often embodied the more traditional American frontier values of individualism.
What doesn't work though is the relationship with Dunaway. The script insinuates that she is in some way damaged, primarily because she takes black and white photos of empty park benches in winter. The scenes between them are bizarre, flipping between the banal and the edgy. (She has some even bleaker photos that she keeps hidden away – Redford says he'd like to see them some time.) Redford is like a passive aggressive rapist here; not forcing himself on her, because he's Robert Redford and he wouldn't do that, but not giving her many choices. Dunaway more of less goes weak at the knees for him but then makes cutting remarks to cover herself. Both of them are trying to persuade each other, themselves and the audience that they are not that kind of guy/girl. The more they deny it, the more it seems to be a really clumsy attempt to shoehorn in a conventional Hollywood romance into a film that is trying to be something a bit more than a conventional Hollywood flick.
Aside from that the film is an excellent terse, slowburn, wintry, New York thriller. It is complicated enough to make you feel clever for being able to follow it, but straightforward enough to let you follow it even if you aren't. It also knows how much it can leave ambiguous or unexplained, without leaving a mainstream audience feeling short changed. And it is alarmingly prescient – when at the end all is revealed it is chilling to hear how obvious the future was back them.
The cast does some exceptional work: Cliff Robertson is great as a CIA boss (working out of his office in the just opened World Trade Centre) but the outstanding performance is Von Sydow as a calm unruffled hit man. It's the best written role in the film but, even so, he is mesmerising in it. These days you're so used to seeing Von Sydow as a contented bystander in Hollywood movies, it's a really shock to see him when he was still an actor, and a formidable one.
Extras:
Original trailer.
20 minute discussion of the film and Pollack's reputation by film historian Sheldon Hall.
Hour long episode of the series The Directors on Pollack's career.
32 page booklet.
