Three Days of the Condor (1975) Review
9/10
Joe Turner reads. Novels, journals, newspapers from everywhere, looking for plots that somebody might use, and filing reports upward to people who never explain what happens to them.
The 9 is for a thriller built on competence instead of heroics. Turner isn’t trained, has never fired at anybody, and survives on the only skill he has: he’s read an enormous number of books about how people do this and can improvise from them.
The withheld point is the Dunaway relationship, which the film needs structurally and handles badly. He abducts her, holds her in her own apartment, and the film moves them into bed within a day, and no amount of context makes that sequence work now.
This is my kind of thriller, and I’d put it near the top of the seventies paranoia pictures. Turner survives on reading, and every clever thing he does is a little bit wrong. That’s smart. The Dunaway section is the only thing keeping it from a 10, and everything else, from the rainy streets to von Sydow’s manners, is close to perfect.
The Massacre Is Bureaucratic
Three men enter a brownstone in New York with a silenced weapon and kill six people in about ninety seconds, professionally and without conversation, while Turner is out getting lunch in the rain. What makes the sequence frightening is its ordinariness. The office looks like a small academic library. People are typing, making coffee, complaining about the heating. The killers are unhurried and check their work, and Max von Sydow’s Joubert supervises like a man doing an inventory.
Then Turner comes back with a paper bag and the film’s whole shape is set. He has no training, no weapon and no idea why, and his only advantage is that somebody assumed he’d be at his desk. That paper bag is the moment the film has me for good.
Owen Roizman shot it, and the New York throughout is gray, wet and completely unglamorous. This is the same photographer who shot The French Connection and The Exorcist, and the city in this film is a place where an ordinary man can be killed indoors without anybody noticing.
The tradecraft is the other pleasure. Turner works out how to rewire a telephone junction box from something he read, uses the Agency’s own listed number in the phone book to prove who he is, and improvises a kidnapping badly. Everything he does is the work of a man applying book knowledge under pressure and getting most of it slightly wrong.
Professional violence is more frightening than passionate violence. Men who are unhurried, quiet and checking their work imply an organization behind them, and you can’t reason with an organization.
Establish the ordinariness first. Two minutes of office routine before the door opens makes the ninety seconds land, and cutting that setup is the most common mistake in this kind of scene. Give your protagonist an accidental reason for surviving. Turner lives because it was raining and he used the back door. That tells the reader immediately that nothing about this is deserved.
The Motive Change
James Grady’s 1974 novel Six Days of the Condor has a rogue element inside the CIA running drugs. That’s a crime story with a conspiracy attached.
Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Rayfiel changed it. In the film the same men are protecting a contingency plan for seizing Middle Eastern oil fields, and they’re not corrupt. They believe they’re doing their jobs.
That single change is the reason the film has lasted and the novel hasn’t, and I think it’s the smartest decision anyone made on the picture.
A conspiracy motivated by greed can be exposed and prosecuted. A conspiracy motivated by a sincere reading of the national interest survives exposure, because the people running it will simply explain themselves. That idea scares me more than any gunman in the film.
Cliff Robertson’s Higgins is the vehicle for it. He’s reasonable throughout, faintly weary, and his final argument is that when people are cold and hungry they’ll want the Agency to have taken the oil and won’t ask how. He’s not defeated at any point in the film. The oil choice was also uncomfortably well timed. The film was in production after the embargo of 1973 had already shown what a fuel shortage does to a country, so an audience in 1975 didn’t need the argument explained to them and couldn’t comfortably dismiss it either.
Von Sydow Steals It
Joubert is a contract killer with no politics, no employer he cares about and no interest in the moral content of the work, and Max von Sydow plays him as the most relaxed person in the picture.
He’s also the only character who tells Turner the truth. In their conversation near the end, Joubert calmly explains how Turner will be killed, who will do it and roughly when, and delivers it as professional courtesy between two people who understand the situation.
The advice he offers is the film’s best moment, and it’s the scene I’d show anyone who doubts von Sydow’s reputation. He suggests Europe and a quiet life, and he tells Turner it’ll be somebody he knows, on a day he isn’t expecting it. He says all of it the way a helpful colleague would, without a trace of threat, and the kindness is what chills me.
That characterization is the reason the film outranks most of its imitators. The assassin is a subcontractor, and the real antagonist is a department with a budget.
His last act confirms it completely. Joubert kills the man who hired him, without ceremony and without any change of expression, because the contract has moved. He has no loyalty to betray and so nothing to be redeemed from. That’s a far colder idea than the villain who turns at the end with a conscience he’d been carrying the whole time, and I much prefer it.
An amoral professional makes a superior source of exposition, because he has no reason to lie and no stake in the protagonist’s survival. Use him to tell the reader what the situation really is at the point where the protagonist has stopped being able to assess it. The information arrives clean and the scene is tense anyway. Separating the executioner from the decision-maker is the structural move. It leaves your real antagonist untouchable and your protagonist with nobody satisfying to defeat.
The Last Line
Turner tells Higgins on a New York street that he’s given the whole story to the New York Times. Higgins asks how he knows they’ll print it. The film cuts to black on Turner’s face. There’s no vindication, no montage of headlines, no scene of the story running. The audience is left with a question the film declines to answer, three years after the Washington Post had answered it once.
That’s a considerably braver ending than it looks. The paranoia films of the period usually end with the machine winning or the truth emerging, and this one ends by admitting that the outcome depends on institutions the protagonist has no control over. It’s also a joke about the moment. In 1975 an audience could reasonably assume the Times would print it. The film isn’t sure, and fifty years later the uncertainty is the part that reads as prophetic.
Pollack, Redford and the Year
Seven point eight million dollars, one of the top box office attractions of 1975, and a single Academy Award nomination for film editing.
This was the fourth of several collaborations between Pollack and Redford, and the casting is doing something specific. Redford in 1975 was the most trusted face in American film, and the picture spends two hours showing that trustworthiness isn’t a defense against anything. Pollack has said the intention was a timely genre piece instead of a political statement, and that production coincided with real revelations about Agency conduct. That gave the film weight nobody had planned for. Critics then complained it hadn’t gone far enough. That’s the usual fate of a film that arrives inside a story still developing. It looked cautious in 1975 and looks accurate now. That’s a better outcome than the reverse.
Dave Grusin’s score deserves a mention for how little it does. It’s thin, jazzy and often absent, and the film runs largely on street noise and telephones. A conspiracy picture scored for menace would have told the audience what to fear, and this one leaves them listening for it themselves.
Casting a trusted actor and then failing to protect him is an efficient way to unsettle an audience. The face replaces a page of characterization.
Timeliness is luck and durability is structure. This film has both, and the durable part is the argument about sincere people doing terrible things. That required no news event to make it work.
When your subject is live, expect to be criticized for insufficient boldness by people reading the news alongside you. That criticism ages worse than the work does.
Should you watch Three Days of the Condor?
Yes, and stay with the last exchange. A man asks whether the newspaper will print the truth and the film refuses to tell him. In 1975 that was a provocation, and now it reads as the most accurate thing in the picture. It gets a 9 from me because every piece of it, from Roizman’s wet gray streets to Higgins’s weary reasonableness to von Sydow’s courtesy, serves the same cold idea. The Dunaway stretch is the one part I’d rewrite, and it’s the only reason this isn’t a 10.
