Three Days of the Condor (1974)

Boy, what is it with you people? You think not being caught in a lie is the same as telling the truth.

Fifty years ago this month, leaks of what came be known as the “Family Jewels” reports made front-page news at The New York Times. These reports, commissioned in 1973 as a direct response to the clusterfuck that was Watergate, detailed CIA actions between 1959 and 1973 that could have been interpreted as outside the agency’s remit. The result was almost seven hundred pages of dirty tricks, illegal surveillance, assassination plots, break-ins, mail tampering and psychological experimentation. Between that and the Pentagon Papers, the CIA found themselves the ambivalent centre of a public relations crisis and the inspiration for a number of paranoid thrillers, including the likes of Executive Action (1973) The Parallax View (1974) and The Conversation (1974), a subgenre that would continue right through to the end of the ‘70s with the frankly bonkers Winter Kills (1979) and become more quotidian with Blow Out (1981) and Cutter’s Way (1981). And then there was Three Days of the Condor.

Originally mooted as a Peter Yates picture with Warren Beatty as lead,¹ Condor eventually fell into Robert Redford’s hands. While Redford had previously worked with Yates on the excellent (if commercially unsuccessful) Dortmunder movie The Hot Rock (1972), the star wanted a more comfortable collaborator behind the camera. Enter Sydney Pollack, who had already directed Redford in one of his bigger hits to date, The Way We Were (1973) and with whom Redford had a solid working relationship. There was only one problem: neither man liked the source material.

James Grady’s bestselling 1974 novel Six Days of the Condor bears little to no resemblance to the movie, beyond its central premise of a CIA reader targeted for assassination. Pollack’s explanation to Grady was simple. According to Grady, Pollack told him “you can’t make a movie spread out over six consecutive days of Robert Redford being on the run because you had to account for him sleeping, shaving etc., so they wrote the script, counted the days … and had three.” This wasn’t the only change: the Ronald Malcolm of the novel is now the much sexier-named Joe Turner; his paralegal kidnappee Wendy Ross is now melancholy photographer Kathy Hale; the central crime is no longer drug smuggling, but something something Middle East and oil stuff something; and the overall plot has been both streamlined and complicated. Oh, and the story location has also been shifted from Washington DC to New York.²

Joe Turner (Redford) is a reader for a clandestine CIA operation based at the American Literary Historical Society. His job is to read mystery novels and various other things to identify any similarities between existing or potential CIA operations. One novel, a thriller with poor sales but multiple translations, piques his curiosity and – while he’s nipped out on a lunch run – brings death to his colleagues in the form of Joubert (Max von Sydow) and a couple of gun-toting assassins.³ Turner goes on the run, kidnaps the photographer Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway) because he needs somewhere safe to stay, and tries to figure out what the hell is going on, while CIA brass (headed by John Houseman and a reptilian Cliff Robertson) attempt to keep it all under wraps.

Lorenzo Semple Jr – screenwriter of The Parallax View – was first charged with turning Six Days of the Condor into a serviceable script, but the bulk of the rewrites were undertaken by regular Pollack collaborator David Rayfiel, who had first done uncredited work on Pollack’s first feature The Slender Thread (1965) and had become something of a script doctor and self-proclaimed “utility man” in the intervening years. “I don’t think I have a strong sense of story, but dramatic situations I know,” he said. “A moment when people speak, I know when it’s strong and when it’s not.” ⁴ Redford also contributed, apparently suggesting the change from drug smuggling to the potential Middle East invasion,⁵ as well as the ending in which Turner gives information about the plot to The New York Times. Even though Pollack had partly taken the job as an opportunity to shake up his own (typically languid) style, he still felt that Condor was “this tremendous personal story of Joe Turner” and a chance to explore the destructive nature of suspicion and paranoia.

And this, gorgeous subbies, is where Your Humble Narrator’s enthusiasm begins to wane. While Three Days of the Condor is solidly directed and beautifully shot in Panavision, and while its first thirty minutes are a lovely introduction to the premise, there is something important missing from the movie, and that is any sense of political commitment. Pollack, unlike many of the television directors he worked alongside in the early days, had no discernible politics in his films, despite being a regular contributor to the Democrats, and it’s difficult to do a paranoid political thriller without some kind of political stance. In a slightly contentious interview with Patrick McGilligan,⁶ Pollack responded to contemporary critics with the argument that Condor was just a movie: “I didn’t want this picture to be judged; it’s a movie. I intended it always as a movie. I never had any pretensions about the picture and it’s making me very angry that I’m getting pretensions stuck on me like tails on a donkey … Here I tried to deal, as much as I could, with trust and suspicion, paranoia, which I think is happening in this country, when every institution I grew up believing was sacrosanct is now beginning to crumble. It’s destroying, in a very serious way, a certain kind of trust that is essential to have in a working society. Now those are all very pretentious ideas to have. But I don’t think they have to be pretentious if you put them in this kind of entertaining piece. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with exploring those ideas as long as you don’t get pretentious about it.”

That’s a hell of a long quote, but it speaks to something that’s always bothered me about Condor – that Pollack thinks righteous indignation about a corrupt intelligence agency is borderline pretentious in 1975 (Jeez, man, read the room), so he attempts to soften the blow and blur the edges. In some cases this works – Joubert’s transformation from stock villain in Six Days to a walking example of shifting amorality in the movie is beautifully done – but it mostly serves to muddle the movie’s intentions. This is mostly because Pollack isn’t interested in the thriller (despite his insistence that he was making a genre picture) – apart from a handful of genuinely fun genre set-pieces (including a ridiculous fight with an evil postman), Pollack is more interested in the relationship between Turner and Kathy, which he clearly wants to use as some kind of metaphor for trust and suspicion. A microcosm, if you will, for the wider sociopolitical landscape. Yeesh, talk about pretentious …

This would be fine if the central relationship worked, but it doesn’t. Redford had more chemistry with Fonda and Streisand than he does with Dunaway. Hell, he arguably had more chemistry with Dustin Hoffman or Michael J. Pollard than he does with Dunaway, an actor whose presence automatically kicks a movie down a notch or two for me.⁷ And while she’s not playing the hickish poseur chic of Bonnie Parker, the flapping melodrama of Evelyn Mulwray, or the straining ballbreaker of Diana Christensen, there’s still never a sense of Dunaway being anyone other than Dunaway. You could say the same for Redford, whose idiosyncrasies as Turner amount to little more than a pair of jeans, a scooter and an eidetic memory, but Redford is at least granted space to breathe a little, look frightened, and awkwardly kick that aforementioned evil postman. All Dunaway has to do is get tied up, be enigmatic about her foundation course photography and then implausibly fall in love with the man who kidnapped her. That’s not to say she’s bad – she manages to drop most of the actorly tics in what few scenes she has – but it’s a thankless and hopelessly underwritten part.

In fact, most of the supporting roles are the same, but they happen to feature character actors for whom those roles were bread and butter. Cliff Robertson might have flirted with leading man status in his early years, but by 1975 he was entering the arena of the skeevy, with turns as the befuddled detective in Man on a Swing (1974), the centre of an inadvertently icky love triangle in Out of Season (1975) and was about to double down on the potential incest with Obsession (1976). As a result, anyone expecting Deputy Director Higgins to be anything other than the bad guy would be sorely disappointed, especially with that combination of sleazy moustache and Wayne Newton hair. Meanwhile, John Houseman plays John Houseman as only John Houseman can - with a plummy English accent (which some might feel is strange for a CIA head, but hey, da movies)⁸ – and Max von Sydow quietly steals the whole show as Joubert, the only truly interesting character in the movie: menacing and inscrutable, seasoned with the usual von Sydow aristocratic charm.

If all this sounds like the kind of cable movie with a decent cast (the Pollack specialty) guaranteed to divert if you caught it channel-hopping (remember that?), then you’d be right. I’d probably watch it again right now if I stumbled across it and wasn’t so irritated. Condor is elevated somewhat by the script, which has enough crackle to make it memorable (particularly when it’s coming out of von Sydow’s mouth) and Owen Roizman’s exemplary cinematography, which makes the most out of the New York winter setting. And despite my grumping, Redford is (and has always been) a fine leading man. Commercially successful, Condor would allow Grady to write a couple of unfilmed sequel novels and inspire a TV reboot which tried to combine both novel and movie with some minor success. Critics were less kind. While Roger Ebert was a fan, Kael and Cocks were less so, with Kael bemoaning the lack of fun (while taking daft pot shots at The Parallax View, because even the Kael reviews I agree with have some bullshit in them) and Cocks merely shrugging: “Three Days of the Condor promises little and keeps its word. It is hard to get indignant about it, or enthusiastic either.”

And I suppose this is the point: I expect a cat-and-mouse, neo-Hitchcock plot to be more fun than Condor ultimately is. It’s not a bad film but it’s not a particularly deep one, either. While The Parallax View presented an America gone gloriously, violently insane and The Conversation used Caul’s Catholicism as a striking metaphor for guilt and moral inaction, Condor just kind of sits there, a string of mildly diverting action sequences, a resourceful protagonist, and an ending that could have been interpreted as ambiguous were Pollack not so adamant that justice lies with The New York Times.⁹ It never quite becomes the movie that either the audience or Pollack want it to be, either because the pacing is still pretty stodgy and the plot opaque, or because Pollack’s themes of trust and suspicion are too woolly to come across with any success. Despite this, Condor remains a firm favourite for many - alas, I am not one of them.

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Next Up: It’s not about the money. It’s about revenge.

1. I see Peter Yates doing a decent job - he had a gift for keeping things moving as well as the light touch that Condor sorely needs; Beatty, on the other hand, wouldn’t have been a great fit. Beatty was always best when he was playing the best-looking and dumbest guy in the room. His Joe Turner probably would’ve pratfalled directly into the line of machine gun fire.

2. There are a bunch of Grady interviews out there, and he never seems anything but grateful that his book was picked for the movies. Like any wise author, he knew to take the money and run, maybe write a couple of sequels to cash in. Good for him.

3. Machine guns, no less. They are silenced, but I do wonder about the efficiency of the whole endeavour. As much as Joubert seems to know what he’s doing, the others are a clumsy, borderline comic bunch. But then I suppose this is in character for an agency that once tried to use exploding conches and cigars to kill Castro.

4. Rayfiel was a new name for me and with good reason: unlike Robert Towne, whose script doctoring is so well known he might as well be credited, Rayfiel flew under the radar. For more on the guy, here’s an article from the NYT (of course).

5. I must have seen this movie a dozen times, and I’ve still never quite worked out what the plan actually is. Yeah, it’s invade the Middle East and destabilise the region, but we get to know nothing about the book that prompted it, so the details are fuzzy, at least in my addled, aging brain.

6. McGilligan has a bee in his bonnet about Salvador Allende, which suggests that CIA involvement in the 1973 coup d'état was reasonably common knowledge. While (friend of Margaret Thatcher) Augusto Pinochet wasn’t installed until late 1974 (around the time Condor was being shot, I believe), it’s still odd that Pollack would remain on the fence about the CIA.

7. I am aware that I may in the minority on this. I think everyone has certain actors that just make their teeth itch. In Dunaway’s case, it’s the combination of her piss-poor take on the Method, obvious rampant egotism, actressy schtick, and a legacy of terrible encounters with the general public. And yes, I know about the bipolar thing, but I don’t recall Brian Wilson ever chucking a cup of piss at Mike Love (though he fucking deserves it). Anyway, I’m glad she’s doing better now and wish her nothing but the best. Ahem.

8. Pollack: “John has this tremendous kind of authority and dignity. It’s almost European.” Probably because Houseman was born in Bucharest and schooled in jolly old England.

9. Yes, I know we can’t hold fifty-year-old movies to the same cynical standards we have today, but we can at least hold them to the cynical standards of fifty years ago, and Condor looked downright naive even then. Even the Charles Bronson action flick Breakout (which came out in the same year) was more critical of the CIA.