Reeling Backward: Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Post-Watergate paranoia is on full display in this spy thriller starring Robert Redford as a bookworm caught up in CIA shenanigans directed by Sydney Pollack.

There was a distinct and fairly sudden shift in spy and crime thrillers in 1970s American films. In a post-Vietnam and -Watergate world, people became very skeptical of their government, the military… even the press and each other. Faith in previously unassailed institutions plummeted, and this was reflected in popular movies with a rise in paranoid plots.

Previously spy movies featured James Bond and the like, dashing and sexy, employing all sorts of resources and tools to go up against the bad guys — usually the Soviet bloc or holdover Nazis. His bosses may have been a bit stiff, but we harbored no doubt whose side they were on.

Seemingly overnight, our cinematic spies and police/military complex became not the forces battling evil but the source of it, or at least its enabler. Institutions that had been directed against our enemies were increasingly aimed at everyday citizens minding their own business.

“The Parallax View.” “All the President’s Men.” “Serpico.” “Marathon Man.” “The Conversation.” All of these films’ prevailing theme is paranoia, fears that often are shown to be well-justified.

Sliding neatly into this theme is 1975’s “Three Days of the Condor,” starring Robert Redford as a bookworm employee of the CIA who becomes targeted for assassination after his entire department is wiped out. Directed by Sydney Pollack, it’s an effective potboiler that is more interesting today for what it says about its time.

In New York City, a building with the name American Literary Historical Society is actually a front for a high-security operation of CIA researchers. According to Joe Turner (Redford), their section’s job is to read books and articles for similarities to actual covert government operations as a way to judge their security or get new ideas.

It’s not a position he takes very seriously, habitually showing up late on his motorized scooter, razzing his elder bosses while he files reports he considers meaningless.

Redford’s look for the movie is vintage ‘70s: his usual flyaway blond hair, paired with oversized, seemingly frameless glasses to give him a slight intellectual look. This is paired with a tweed jacket over a sweater above bell-bottom jeans. A free-thinking hippie type who went straight to work for the spooks, it says.

Joe is so dismissive of his role in the intelligence community he can barely even remember his own codename, Condor. This becomes important when a crew of assassins, one disguised as a mailman to gain entry, enter the building and kill everyone. Joe is only saved because he ducked out a back way during a rainstorm to pick up everyone’s lunch.

He runs to a payphone and calls in like he’s supposed to, eventually being connected with the deputy director, Higgins (Cliff Robertson). They arrange a time and place where Joe is supposed to be picked up and taken to safety by his section chief, Wicks (Michael Kane). Already in disbelief and not knowing who to trust, he demands that someone he knows is brought along as proof, so his friend Sam Barber (Walter McGinn), another low-level agency employee, is enlisted.

Instead, Wicks tries to kill Joe and Sam both. Back at the HQ, head man Wabash (John Houseman) and the rest have decided it’s better to clean up the mess in anyway they can, and Condor is just a loose end to be tied up rather than a loyal (if not terribly committed) employee to be saved.

From there, the movie becomes one long chase-chase as Joe tries to figure out why everyone in his section was targeted and how to save his own neck. “I’m not a field agent,” he insists, but soon shows considerable adroitness at staying one step ahead of the pros. Although Joe isn’t a trained spy, he has literally read everything there is to write about the craft. Soon he’s tapping phone lines and employing nascent computer networks to aid him.

Max von Sydow turns up as Joubert, the quietly menacing chief of the assassins of vaguely European stock. Their first meeting in person is a tense and effective elevator ride where each is trying to take the measure of the other as people shuffle on and off the car. Later, their adversarial relationship will take a surprising turn, which I’ll not spoil.

Faye Dunaway plays Kathy, a photographer Joe chances upon and essentially kidnaps so he can hide out at her place. This leads to a lot of very uncomfortable sexual dynamics, where he roughhouses her and ties her up in her apartment. Later he returns and more or less demands sex — spy stuff is very tiring, it turns out, and he needs a few hours’ distraction — and she acquiesces, and by morning has become his full ally.

Aside from the major ick factor, the whole Kathy subplot detracts from the film’s purpose of building a pervading sense of anxiety. She becomes the quiet in the storm for Joe, just when the movie should be pushing things to the next level. I wish the whole thing could’ve been written out.

(Robert Ludlum would use almost the identical device with “The Bourne Identity” published five years later. Bond bedded girls willingly; in this era they are pretty much forced.)

Screenwriters Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Rayfiel learned well the first lesson of adapting a novel for the screen is to economize. To wit: James Grady’s book was actually titled “Six Days of the Condor.” The wisely decided they would only need half that time.

Pollack had already worked with Redford on two films, “Jeremiah Johnson” and “The Way We Were,” and would go on to make three more, including “Out of Africa” a decade later, for which he won Oscars as both director and producer. Nearly all their collaborations were critical and commercial hits, as was this one.

Pollack insisted they had no ulterior motive in making the film, just wanting a straight spy thriller. But perhaps they were simply swept along in the current of the time, observers and absorbers of the culture of fear that marked that era’s politics.

Toward the end of the story, Joe becomes less of a naive victim and more an angry antagonizer of the corrupt system. “You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?” he demands of Higgins.

It’s as good as any a motto for that time, or this one.