Die drei Tage des Condor

I'm sure that Robert Redford thought he had the greatest job in the world in Three Days Of The Condor. He's a reader for the Central Intelligence Agency. His job along with several other associates is to read various books, fiction and non-fiction, in a comfortable old Upper East Side of New York brownstone and glean ideas for the agency.

Except that one fine day an innocuous report gets turned in from his brownstone that panics someone in a high place. A hit team is sent out and Redford by dint of going out for lunch orders through a back entrance misses a massacre. After he calls it in and then escapes another murder attempt in which a friend in the agency is killed, he doesn't know who to trust.

Three Days Of The Condor is a finely tuned spy thriller which will keep you guessing right up to the end. You will be inside Robert Redford's head totally, you won't know what to believe either. Eventually the only one he does trust is a woman whom he forces at gunpoint to help him escape. The woman is Faye Dunaway who goes Stockholm and enlists in helping Redford try and sort things out.

Redford proves to be quite resourceful even winning the admiration of Max Von Sydow, the contract killer hired to get him. After all he's not a field agent, but as Von Sydow points out, 'he does read'.

Sydney Pollack kept things going at a Hitchcock like level of tension with great performances from his cast. That would also include Cliff Robertson as the CIA station chief whose motives are mixed to say the least.

If your taste tends to espionage thrillers, don't miss Three Days Of The Condor.

This film was very effective in maintaining the tension not only of the Condor's life and death mission to discover the reasons for the massacre of his colleagues but also the relationship between him and Kathy. The cast is uniformly good though Redford obviously carries the film. Von Sydow is again great as the strictly professional assassin. The entire film had an aura of authenticity that had me entirely engrossed. Recommended, 8/10.

Saw this movie in theaters way back when (yes I am old). It was so long ago that I had forgotten most of the movie. Thoroughly enjoyed watching it again during the virus lockdown. As much fun for first time viewers of today as it is for old timers like me.

Towards the end of this film - two of the main protagonists engage in a conversation that is so telling - it could have been written yesterday and not thirty years ago.

The West has long looked to the east and its oil fields as potential targets and this film just reinforces the fact that what we think of as a new war has in fact been a raging cold war for decades. It is not and never has been about freedom –it is now and always has been a war of economic necessity. Although this film is not as renowned as many of the other paranoid spy thrillers of the 70's such as the Conversation or the Parallax View it is still a very watchable and intriguing film.

Redford is well cast as a fish out of water having to adapt his talents from the page to real life. The central relationship between Dunaway and Redford doesn't work as well as it should. She is too keen to fall for his charms and were it not Redford but a more charmless man like Hackman for example I doubt it would have worked at all.

The film is not as complex as has suggested. It is neat and easy enough to follow. It has a beguiling character that is better for my money than harder hitting films like Parallax. Redfords fight in the middle of the film is copied in a many ways by the new Bourne movie fight scenes. Indeed the double talk spy will appeal to fans of this genre. Bourne today is the nearest thing to Condor in the movies.

And Von Sydow is as always untouchable. Worth a remake but I still have a very dear place in my big movie heart for well made 70s films like this.

Though this movie is 45 years old, the movie still holds up today and just shows that our governments are still fighting over the same things that they were in the mid-70s. Timeless. Beautiful transfer. Brilliant thriller and very fast paced. Catch it on Amazon Prime streaming