Three Days of the Condor (1975) Review

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 is not trained, has never fired at anybody, and survives on the only skill he has, which is that he has 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.

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 the only advantage he has is that somebody assumed he would be at his desk.

Owen Roizman shot it, and the New York throughout is grey, wet and completely unglamorous. This is the same photographer who shot The French Connection and The Exorcist, and the city here 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.

The Motive Change

James Grady’s 1974 novel Six Days of the Condor has a rogue element inside the CIA running drugs, which is 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 are not corrupt. They believe they are doing their jobs.

That single change is the reason the film has lasted and the novel has not. 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.

Cliff Robertson’s Higgins is the vehicle for it. He is reasonable throughout, faintly weary, and his final argument is that when people are cold and hungry they will want the Agency to have taken the oil and will not ask how. He is 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 demonstrated what a fuel shortage does to a country, so an audience in 1975 did not need the argument explained to them and could not 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 is also the only character who tells Turner the truth. Their conversation near the end, in which Joubert calmly explains how Turner will be killed, who will do it and roughly when, is delivered as professional courtesy between two people who understand the situation.

The advice he offers is the film’s best moment. He suggests Europe, a quiet life, and tells Turner that it will be somebody he knows and that it will happen on a day when he is not expecting it. He is not threatening. He is being helpful.

That characterization is the reason the film outranks most of its imitators. The assassin is not the antagonist. He 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 therefore nothing to be redeemed from, which is a far colder idea than a villain who turns at the end and turns out to have been carrying a conscience around with him the whole time.

The Last Line

Turner tells Higgins on a New York street that he has given the whole story to the New York Times. Higgins asks how he knows they will print it.

The film cuts to black on Turner’s face. There is 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 is 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 also functions as a joke about the moment. In 1975 an audience could reasonably assume the Times would print it. The film is not 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 demonstrating that trustworthiness is not a defense against anything.

Pollack has said the intention was a timely genre piece instead of a political statement, and that production coincided with genuine revelations about Agency conduct, which gave the film weight nobody had planned for. Critics then complained it had not gone far enough.

That is the usual fate of a film that arrives inside a story still developing. It looked cautious in 1975 and looks accurate now, which is a better outcome than the reverse.

Dave Grusin’s score deserves a mention for how little it does. It is 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.

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, which in 1975 was a provocation and now reads as the most accurate thing in the picture.

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