The Condor's Days

Another of the movies that I had to record during one of the free previews was the 1970s spy thriller Three Days of The Condor. It's going to be on Epix tomorrow (Mar. 8) at 6:00 PM, so recently, I sat down to watch it and do a review on it.

Robert Redford plays Joe Turner, who lives in New York and bikes to his job at the American Literary Historical Society. We already know something is up, however, because we see somebody watching Joe ring for entry into the building and then ticking a name off a list. Sure enough, the Society is a front for an odd little CIA organization. Apparently, the workers here read a ton of books, looking for spy ideas that either the CIA hasn't thought of themselves, or perhaps ideas that some double agent within the organization might have thought up.

Joe draws the short straw of having to get lunch for everybody from the nearby diner (nobody brown-bags it?), and because of the rain, he goes out the back way, such that the people watching him in the opening scene never see him leave. They knock on the door, and when they're admitted, the promptly shoot the secretary and everybody else in the place. Everybody else, of course, means that they don't shoot Joe, and don't realize until it's too late that they've missed one of the workers. Joe returns from picking up lunch and obviously finds everyone else dead.

He doesn't much know what to do, so he calls up his station chief at the CIA's World Trade Center office, who tells him they'll send someone to bring him in. But Joe, code named Condor, doesn't recognize the person they're going to send and senses that something might be up. Indeed, we viewers know something is up, thanks in part to Wabash (John Houseman), much higher up in the agency, trying to get Joe liquidated.

The bigwigs in the agency think it shouldn't be that difficult to deal with Condor, since he's never done any field work. But what they're forgetting is that Joe has read voraciously, and read a whole lot of nutty spy plans and other things that give him ideas about how to proceed to remain unfound by the agency. Unsurprisingly, the contact that the station chief claimed would bring him to safety was a trap, leading Joe to duck into a store where he kidnaps a woman, Kathy (Faye Dunaway). She's a stranger who has know idea what's going on, which also means that the rest of the agency will have no idea who she is or where she and Joe are. At least, not until Joe takes her car for a ride as part of an attempt to figure out exactly what's going on. Kathy, unsurprisingly, doesn't believe a word of what Joe is saying.

Joe finds Joubert (Max von Sydow), a freelance killer, is trying to kill him. Joubert may be in the employ of Higgins (Cliff Robertson), one of Joe's bosses, or perhaps somebody else may be behind all of this. Joe has to try to stay one step ahead of everybody, which is going to be difficult considering how many resources the CIA has at its disposal.

Three Days of the Condor was made in 1975, a year after Richard Nixon resigned, and the same year that the US Senate's Church Committee was investigating the CIA; both of those things put a sense of paranoia high on a lot of people's minds. One may find it hard to believe that the CIA would have been able to do as much as is portrayed in movies like this, but in more recent years we've had people like Edward Snowden come forward to show just how much the Federal government is spying on its own people. And the really ironic thing is that the sort of people who would have lauded movies like this have become the establishment, cheering on the politicization of intelligence agencies to go after wrong-thinking candidates. The movie's last line is particularly prescient albeit not in a way the filmmakers had in mind; just consider how the putative idea of "fake news" is being used to silence any information that goes against the administrative state's narrative on any number of issues, from Hunter Biden's laptop to coronavirus, or even people who have a disagreement with their school boards.

As for Three Days of the Condor as entertaiment? Well, it's a well-acted movie, and entertaining enough with a nice vintage look at New York City as it was in the mid-1970s. I just felt that I had to remind myself not to take things too seriously and just enjoy the movie for what it is.