Easy Reader

By Fearless Young Orphan

Three Days of the Condor (1975), Directed by

It’s hard for me to believe this great film is almost forty years old, not only because that fact makes me feel incredibly old but because its subject matter seems so current somehow. The “trust no one” atmosphere, which was probably a new and uncomfortable feeling in the era during which the film was released, is more or less a commonplace feeling today. If Joe Turner is being pursued relentlessly by his own government, it may be shocking the hell out of him, but it’s just par for the course for us. Three Days of the Condor is classic spy-movie material of the real-life variety, but it sinks enough fantasy into the story to make it appealing across the great divide. You know what I’m talking about, no? You’ve got your James Bond on one side, living the high life of playboy secret agent, and you’ve got The Sandbaggers on the other side, talking out spy business in dank little government rooms. The two sides of the spy thriller rarely meet, but I’d have to say that in Condor, they come as close as I’ve ever seen them.

Joe Turner () works for the CIA, in a facility that is kept securely monitored but which fronts itself as a historical society. He and his seven or eight co-workers seem like an ordinary workaday bunch, a casual office environment where it just happens that they must show IDs every now and then. Their purpose is to read. Yep, read, and that’s it. They read everything that is published. They are searching for patterns, codes, leaked information. They are looking for ideas, too. If they turn up anything interesting, they submit it to the higher-ups and then they go on a coffee break.

Joe Turner would just be a regular working slob if he didn’t look like Robert Redford, who was at the absolute peak of his unique Robert Redford-y brand of unreal-but-vulnerable handsomeness. If he’s better looking than any human could expect to be or expect to see in real life, then it’s deftly never mentioned in the film. He plays Joe Turner as if he’s no more noticeable than William H. Macy, until one scene later in the film during which I think we’re going to have to make a concession. We’ll get to that.

Well one ordinary day, Joe happens to go out for doughnuts or something and returns to find everybody in his office has been assassinated. He gets this amazed look on his face as if he’s just remembered, “Oh shit, I work for the CIA, don’t I?” and then the film kicks into its unparalleled journey of suspense and paranoia, as this more-or-less ordinary “Joe” struggles to stay alive, stay hidden, figure out who’s trying to kill him, and figure out why. He’s not James Bond, but in a way he’s better – nobody expects him to be James Bond, after all, but he’s read all the James Bonds and knows the tricks of the trade. Give him a minute to call them up, then suddenly the enemy realizes they’ve got a rather unexpected adversary on their hands.

Being an extremely nerdy nerd myself, I adore movies about smart people. I cherish a film that features a hero who gets to be the hero because he knows more than anyone else in the room. Joe is not especially brave or abnormally athletic; he probably had some training but it was long ago and perfunctory. After all, nobody expected he’d need to do anything but read books. Now he’s on the run and has a library of information in his head to keep him, barely, out of harm’s reach. He finds quickly that the CIA knows a lot about him, such as where he might go, and whom he might try to contact. They invite him to “come in,” and this sounds like a good idea to poor Joe, until he realizes that this “I only joined the CIA for the health plan!” invitation might mean “coming in” dressed in a body bag.

The supporting cast is excellent. You’ve got slimy as Higgins of the CIA, who is obviously not interested in helping Joe as much as he claims to be. You’ve got chilling as an assassin brought in to do the job when Joe proves more resilient than they thought he’d be. Why does Max von Sydow always strike me as “the grandfather who will slit my throat”? And finally, we have , doing a fantastic job in a role that could have easily been the dumbest movie part ever developed.

Joe has to run and hide, run and hide. He has seen even more of his friends die before his eyes. Exhausted and terrified, he reluctantly takes beautiful Kathy Hale (Dunaway) hostage and holes up in her apartment, tying her up with panty hose and the like. Now Kathy Hale is about as ordinary-looking a woman as Joe Turner is an ordinary-looking man, meaning that now we’ve got two of the most gorgeous people in the world locked in an apartment together playing bondage games. Yes, there will be sex. Yes, Kathy is perfectly willing.

If Joe had looked like more like William Oh yeah, she’s thinkin’ about it. H. Macy, maybe she would have balked? I’m not trying to insult Mr. Macy, who is an attractive man, only just perhaps not on the first night after he’s tied you to your toilet. But this is what I was talking about before: we are crossing the line from realistic boardroom espionage into the James Bond territory where, whether or not they’re happy about their spy status, the spies are still getting laid.

Through the magic of chemistry, though, this plot device actually works. Kathy sees that Joe is not a bad man but a very frightened one who has resorted to desperate measures, and her bravado in face of his threats strikes admiration in Joe. They are not just pretty people who happen to hook up because there is no one else around. They are that, but they aren’t just that – I mean, there really is a sizzle in the air between them and they really do share a few moments of genuine understanding. This kind of thing can feel gimmicky, particularly when a sex scene is inserted in a film merely so the film can be said to have a sex scene, but not so here. I believe that these two would hook up. I believe that it would be sincere and exciting, though probably doomed. At this point, Joe is not a man with excellent prospects.

With Kathy’s help, Joe is able to arrange matters on the outside so that he can find out who wants him dead and then try to circumvent that unhappy outcome. But as matters progress, it seems less and less like he’s being attacked by foreign enemies, and more and more as if he’s been used as a disposable pawn in a much larger problem. He read something he wasn’t supposed to read, or saw something he wasn’t supposed to see. He was just doing his job, maybe doing it a little too well. Now information is more valuable than life. At the time this movie was released, information was a scary new commodity. I still say that if you gave everyone in this movie a smart phone and an updated haircut, the whole story could be plopped down in 2011 and we’d be none the wiser.

Obviously I admire this movie a great deal. It is tense, romantic, exciting, often too suspenseful to bear. There is a scene in an elevator, with Max von Sydow and Robert Redford merely staring ahead as the floors tick by, that gives me something like a nervous ulcer. I have seen Three Days of the Condor at least five times, probably more, but who’s counting? I’m happy to write about it now and hope I can bring it to some new fan’s attention. In the context of spy films, it’s got a classic status that transcends the subgenres of the genre, if you’ll excuse me for being trite about it. Joe is just a smart guy who is unexpectedly thrust into the spy game and finds himself rather good at it, like it or not. And he gets the girl.