[.ca] Three Days of the Condor (Widescreen) (ISBN 6305511055)

Amazon.com Essential Video:
Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack continued their longtime collaboration (the actor and director have worked together on Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, The Electric Horseman, and Out of Africa, among other films) with this taut spy drama. Redford plays a reader for U.S. intelligence who becomes a hunted man after he is not among the victims of a mass murder of his colleagues. Faye Dunaway does solid work as the frightened and mystified woman whom he forces to conceal him, and Max von Sydow is appropriately cool as a professional assassin. That same, sustained tone of danger and expectation that made Pollack's The Firm so much fun can be found in this 1975 thriller, albeit with an appropriate dose of post-Watergate paranoia. --Tom Keogh

The invisible government! Where?:
Whenever I see this movie I always hear Roger Daltry's voice singing, 'can you see the real me?' Which is what a less loquacious Robert Redford tries to do after what may be one of the top ten movie opening scenes of all time, 70's, 80's, 90's or beyond. Earlier reviews have fairly well constructed and described the plot but what's interesting is the unbelievability of it. Sydney Pollack keeps the heat on and the emotional cul de sacs plentiful as Redford tries to whittle down not so much the who killed all his coworkers but the why. I believe alongside "Bullit," "French Connection," "Body Heat" and a few others, this is an essential movie both for it's time and our time. In light of Vietnam and Watergate, we just didn't blindly trust Uncle Sam anymore and were frequently reminded of the protest idiom, 'love your country; fear your government.' And for a captivating two hours, Redford is 'everyperson' ever profiled, searched, audited, traffic stopped, drafted and perhaps far worse. We didn't have to read George Orwell to know big brother was and is watching. Cliff Robertson, a gifted actor denied his peak years because of pseudo-administration influence (do you remember 'Flowers for Algernon/Charley?), ironically plays the government role, as you would expect, brilliantly, and Max Von Sydow, is as always, superlative. I agree with some of the criticism of Faye Dunaway. She did better in other roles than she did here. It could have been Meryl Streep or Glenn Close as well, possibly better. Essential movie if you want to know what you're talking about. Larry Scantlebury. 5 Stars.

This movie is very intelligent:
I liked the plot and the technical twists and turns of this thriller. Robert Redford plays a cia employee who reads books to find possible codes. He finds patterns and trys to break them or alert the Cia to there existence. He comes across something that causes his whole office or team to be wiped out leaving him as the only survivor, because he was out to lunch. How he goes about trying to survive is very intelligent and entertaining. There is a dry romance between he and Dunaway. He is on the run and time is not on hand so there scenes are quick and to the point. I liked the dialogue it was also dry and to the point. It sometimes took a few minutes for it to sink in. A highly intelligent film with good entertainment value. Worth watching.

GREAT FILM, UNIMPRESIVE POLITICAL VIEWS:
Robert Redford made a clunker called "The Way We Were" with Barbra Streisand that desperately tried to explain, apologize for, justify, glorify and approve of being an American Communist during McCarthyism, but just plain fails. He made the 1973 classic "Three Days of the Condor" (1973), with Cliff Robertson and Faye Dunnaway. He plays a CIA reader, a kind of pre-Tom Clancy research guy, a benign fellow among other benign CIA fellows, all of whom are murdered in a fuzzily explained hit by bad CIA fellows. After escaping, Redford tries to get to the bottom of it. Since he is a genius he has the intellectual tools to outwit his chasers. This is the film's highlight, revolving around the sexual tension between Redford and the redoubtable Faye, who he "kidnaps" in order to have a place to hide out, her apartment. The movie goes off the deep when the whole conspiracy turns out to be about the CIA's covert operations in the Middle East, where the U.S. apparently is planning the invasion (that never actually occurred) to take over OPEC. The message is that The Company murders innocents, the U.S. is a warmongering empire, and tool of capitalist greed. It is Redford's answer to Guatemala, Iran and Chile, where the people killed were generally Communists. Redford would rather show the CIA killing Chinese- and African-Americans and other non-threats. STEVEN TRAVERS AUTHOR OF "BARRY BONDS: BASEBALL'S SUPERMAN" STWRITES@AOL.COM

Dated and Often Bizarre Thriller Amusing only to Old People:
Like probably most people who were born well after Watergate broke, I became interested in seeing this film after seeing it lumped in numerous times with other paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the era, most notably Coppola's The Conversation and Pakula's The Parallax View. Those are two outstanding films, and Pollack's effort doesn't hold a candle to either. This movie is a disaster. Despite a dynamite opening act and a somewhat intriguing conclusion, together with a modicum of timeliness and poignancy with regard to real-world goings-on at the CIA, the vast majority of the film is spent slogging through dated fight choreography, awkward sex scenes, and some of the most atrocious dialogue ever committed to the silver screen. Faye Dunaway is particularly off-putting in a muted and emotionally confusing performance as a photographer who always blathers on about metaphorical pictures she keeps hidden away and only lets some people see. Only Cliff Robertson and Max von Sydow escape unscathed from this silly, dated picture, resisting Redford's overacting and turning in fine performances (although Robertson's hair is perhaps the film's greatest mystery). To make matters worse, the soundtrack sounds like pornography, a perfectly awful mix of xylophone and smooth jazz. For a much better time, please consider The Parallax View. If you have your heart set on Pollack, just watch The Firm, and you'll get the paranoia, the chasing and spying, and the pretty male lead, while what you sacrifice in political overtone you will gain in character development. I really thought I had something special when I took this home to watch it; it began with such promise. Truly it does not compare to the emotional wallop of Gene Hackman's Harry Caul, nor the mind-blowing psychadelic tension of Pakula's government coverups. Of this trio of would-be master Seventies spy storytellers, Sidney Pollack is the odd man out.

Candor about "Condor":
Released the year after Watergate, this was among the first of the "paranoid thriller" films involving conspiracies, rogue CIA agents, and whatnot. While it probably seemed groundbreaking and fresh in 1975, three decades of similarly plotted movies have dulled Condor's edge. Robert Redford plays an agent, code name "Condor," who works in a scholarly-appearing CIA front organization in New York that analyzes world literature for significant patterns (whose significance to the spook agency isn't spelled out very convincingly). While he goes to the deli to pick up lunch for his crew, a team of assassins gains entry to the office and wipes out all of his colleagues there, as well as another who is at home. Redford, realizing he was supposed to be among the victims, goes on the run and plays cat-and-mouse with various CIA officers, any of whom could be behind the killings. He chooses at random a woman photographer (Faye Dunaway) as his unwilling accomplice while hiding and trying to penetrate the evil cabal within the "Company." In one of the screen's unlikeliest romances, Dunaway finds her fear and distrust of Redford's character yielding to belief in his story and then a dangerous liaison with him. The director, Sydney Pollack, has often blended the elements of commercial cinema with intelligence and taste (e.g., Out of Africa). This is another such attempt, but not one of his better efforts. The genre has worn thin, as noted earlier, and the script staggers from cliche to cliche. I won't be giving away anything important if I tell you that the denouement is, yes, "It's all about ... oil!" I am usually unable to warm to Redford, and this was no exception. There is no "there" there, as Gertrude Stein said about Oakland. He strikes poses and lets his golden hair do his acting for him. There is also a featured (but minor) role for John Houseman as a sour, cold-eyed case officer. He lays it on thick. Still, several of the performances give Condor what distinction it has. Dunaway is better than I would have expected, quite credible and sometimes touching as a lonely introvert. Cliff Robertson, one of the underestimated actors of the '60s and early '70s (what ever happened to him?), is strong as the CIA officer assigned to "bring in" Condor. Best of all is the great Max von Sydow, who starred in many of Ingmar Bergman's films, playing a freelance assassin. Watch how a master actor makes a meal out of a feebly written part. Several scenes were shot outside and inside the World Trade Center, which was then brand new. They are chilling in a way the filmmakers could not have conceived.