98) 3 Days of the Condor

3 Days of the Condor (1975)

Director: Sydney Pollack

Starring: Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Max Von Sydow, Cliff Robertson, Michael Kane

School is back in. The second semester has kicked off and this term I am tutoring for a subject called 'Screens, Images, Ideas', not quite as straight forward as 'Introduction to Cinema'. For the first six weeks of the course I am right in my element because we are looking at New Hollywood cinema. The course convener has chosen an interesting place to start. You'd expect to start things off by looking at either Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde or The Graduate, given that they are the three films which are seen as the starting point for the New Hollywood movement. Instead we jumped straight into the middle of the period to look at Sydney Pollack's 3 Days of the Condor, a decision I didn't mind since I've never seen the film before.

Joe Turner (Redord), codename 'Condor', is a reader for Section 17 of the CIA, fronting as the American Literacy Historical Society. His job is to read published material from all over the world to see if it is being used to send covert messages. Turner's suspicions are roused by an obscure book which has been published in three languages; Dutch, Spanish and Arabic, so he files a report. Later, after going on the lunch run, he returns to the office to find everyone has been murdered. He contacts his CIA superiors to report the incident and organise to get picked up, but when he arrives at the rendezvous point he is almost killed. Unsure who he can trust, Turner abducts a young woman, Kathy Hale (Dunaway), and uses her apartment as a safe place to hide while he tries to work out just who is after him and why.

One of the features of the New Hollywood period was that American films started to speak to the experience of the American people, exploring issues, ideas and themes that were relevant to the time. Previously Hollywood film had been all about escapism; large scale epics and glittery musicals, whereas in the late 1960s and the 1970s Hollywood films began to function as a form of social commentary. In the 1960s and 1970s a number of things had occured which had shaken the American psyche; there was the debacle that was the Vietnam War, the assassination of President Kennedy and the release of the controversial Warren Report, and, of course, there was the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Nixon. These events had led to a loss of trust in their government and left the American people suspicious of their institutions. Thus the early 1970s saw a cycle of films dealing with paranoia and conspiracies. These films included Alan Pakula's conspiracy trilogy of Klute, The Parallax View and All the President's Men, Roman Polanski's Chinatown, Francis Coppola's The Conversation and Sydney Pollack's 3 Days of the Condor. In his review of Pollack's film, American critic Roger Ebert noted that it was a sign of the changing times that Hollywood stars who would once have been playing cowboys and generals were now playing wiretappers, assassins or targets.

I found the film's final scene very interesting because of the context out of which the film came. I don't like to ruin the ending of films for people so I won't say exactly what happened, just that the film ends with Turner putting his fate in the hands of the press, showing a great deal of faith in the integrity of the free press. I found this really interesting because, as I said before Vietnam, the Warren Report and Watergate had left Americans disillusioned with their government and their institutions. But the fact that Watergate was blown open by two journalists from the Washington Post meant that despite this lack of trust in their institutions there was still a faith in the integrity of the free press. So the final scene of 3 Days of the Condor feels very much like a product of it's time, coming out of a very small window before the the integrity of the press came under equal scrutiny. In the following year Sidney Lumet's brilliant film Network is released, exploring the influence of the profit orientation of the television networks, turning the spotlight onto the media.

I love a good supporting actor. Over the last couple of years I've developed a growing appreciation for the value a good supporting cast can add to a film. 3 Days of the Condor has a great supporting performance by the great Swedish actor Max Von Sydow as the assassin Joubert. Von Sydow is one of those guys, like Christopher Plummer or Christopher Lee, who just continuously shows up in films of the last sixty or seventy years. He first came onto the radar in the 1950s through his work with legendary director Ingmar Bergman, appearing in, among others, his highly regarded films The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. He really broke the US market in 1965 when he scored the role of Jesus in George Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told, leading an all star cast which included the likes of Charlton Heston, Martin Landau, Angela Lansbury, Sidney Poitier, John Wayne, Donald Pleasense, Shelley Winters and Claude Rains. Over the last 50 years he has continued to pop up in an eclectic range of films including The Exorcist, Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, Dune, Ghostbusters II, Minority Report, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Rush Hour 3. I've already come across him twice this year in Shutter Island and Robin Hood. Especially now, in his old age, he adds a real sense of prestige to a film. Through his connection to Bergman his presence brings with it a sense of film history, a history you know directors like Scorsese, and likely in this case Pollack, are trying to play off when they cast him in their films.

3 Days of the Condor is a well made thriller. It is intense and exciting, and Redford, Dunaway and Von Sydow all put in good performances. But it is not one of the greats. If you look at that shortlist of 1970s paranoia/conspiracy movies I mentioned above, it is not as good as Chinatown, The Conversation or All the President's Men and I haven't seen Klute or The Parallax View so I can't really comment on those. It is a solid three and a half stars kind of movie. One you'll enjoy but not one you'll want to see again and again.