Although not up to the standard of director Sydney Pollack’s immediate predecessor The Yakuza as a ripping genre yarn leant weight and atmosphere by artful and intimate handling, Three Days of the Condor is nonetheless one of the best paranoid ‘70s films. It’s a fitting precursor to star Robert Redford’s subsequent production All the President’s Men, and also a terrific starring vehicle for Redford himself and Faye Dunaway in an atypically demure role, as Joseph Turner, the gadabout young CIA researcher who finds himself pursued by assassins, and Kathy Hale, the brittle, slightly pathetic photographer he snatches off the street to provide him first with transport and then a safe harbour. Turner, codenamed Condor, finds himself in a world of pain when his co-workers, including his girlfriend (Tina Chen, whom I know best from Alice’s Restaurant), are brutally slaughtered by a team of assassins invading their office in downtown Manhattan
Pollack’s snappy, crisp filmmaking is still a long way before the sluggish prestige work he churned out through the ‘80s and ‘90s, and the gamy New York locations well-employed. Less pretentiously stylised in its evocations of surveillance culture and political conniving than Coppola’s The Conversation (and co-writer Lorenzo Semple Jr had just penned the more baroque study in ’70s alarmism, The Parallax View, 1974), it evokes existential malaise just as well, in the unexpected erotic charge that Turner and Kathy find together in close circumstances. Pollack cuts between a sex scene and Kathy’s desolate photographs to illustrate the hollowness, rather than heat, motivating their tryst, a visual flourish that works better than it should. The idea that political alienation and the emotional alienation of post-‘60s, post-liberation urban pick-up culture are similar is intriguingly described, and summarized memorably in Kathy’s slightly forlorn, slightly aggressive self-description as “the old spy-fucker”. Cliff Robertson is oddly cast but suitably shifty as Higgins, the company man with whom Turner tries and fails to find some common ground. It’s close to being Redford’s best performance, his glib, bouncy character shading into sullen, grave, dishevelled confusion whilst fighting for his life, with nuance and confidence he didn’t always get to display in some of his blander pretty-boy parts.
It’s a problem, common in the spy yarn genre, when Turner begins to turn into a bit of a superman survivor, adept at avoiding surveillance, combat and wiretapping, in spite of his resolutely non-technical job (he “reads a lot” is the slightly glib explanation for his instant mastery of more obscure spying techniques). His sudden omnicompetence is balanced by excessive naiveté about political motives: surely a guy who joins the CIA isn’t quite this dewy, no matter how nerdy and distracted. This thin quality is backed up by a terrific story set-up that fails, finally, to go anywhere particularly vital, a point that Pollack tries to conceal with a vague, menacing anti-climax, which is effective to a degree, and captures the unmoored, cynical feel of the Watergate-era, an age defined by not knowing which way to turn in an age of betrayed institutions and failed countercultural alternatives.
But the film works best on an interpersonal level rather than a political one, in the scenes between Redford and Dunaway and also in his fascinating exchanges with his technical nemesis, Von Sydow’s terrific embodiment of bland, self-effacing villainy-for-hire. Joubert considers himself a purely professional tool of power without any moral engagement beyond doing his job and surviving and, after relentlessly pursuing our hero about the city and exterminating his friends and lover, turns into his friendly helper and advisor when he’s dispensed his contracted services. Like many of the best spy movies, Condor is in truth about the mystery people are to each-other and themselves.
