A CIA agent returns from lunch to discover his entire office staff murdered, and must go into hiding to avoid his own murder by agents within the agency.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 28-MAR-2006
Media Type: DVDRobert 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
Buy “Three Days of the Condor” For Only $5.33
March 5, 2010
#1
The many toubled, undemocratic areas of Africa don’t have leaders that have sworn to stop at nothing until the United States is destroyed. Whether or not he actually had the capability to do so, the leader of Iraq did so swear and he did lead the world to believe that he had such capability. But thanks for commenting.
As for the film, I know it won a couple Oscars and all, but I just didn’t like it. I thought the editing was poor, that the scenes were long and often unnecessary. Although the story was good, a modern director would have put it together a lot better.
March 5, 2010
#2
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.
March 5, 2010
#3
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
March 5, 2010
#4
Ignore the background story; enjoy the “thriller” aspects – and be glad we live in a country that allows this type of commentary while acknowledging a need for the intelligence community !
March 5, 2010
#5
A good suspenseful movie about the spy game. Redford plays a CIA analyst who comes back from lunch [the diner is still on Lextington ave.] and everyone in the office has been murdered. The intent of the movie is to show us how evil the CIA can be, typical Hollywood left wing propoganda of the time, 1975. The CIA thinks someone in the office is a double agent so everyone must go. I hope they would be this efficient today. This movie wants the government to play fair in a very ruthless cold-war world. Redford just wants out but he doesn’t know who to trust, and it appears the best result for the shadow government is to elimate Turner played by Redford. The idea is that our government will do whatever is needed to maintain our way of living as will all other governments, even killing innocent people to protect us. Boy I hope so. Did the CIA lie to President Bush to get us into Iraq? This is a suspenseful and entertianing film with a good cast Faye Dunaway, Max Von Sydow and Cliff Robertson. Where is this CIA today, instead of arresting terrorists they should be dumping them in land fills.