Three Days of the Condor (1975)

This 1975 spy thriller directed by Sydney Pollack was already at the top of my Netflix queue when word came of Pollack's death. He was a very respectable presence in Hollywood, as director, producer, and actor; I especially liked him as an actor. (Indeed, I thought I had a nifty trivia question to which Pollack was the only answer -- "Name an actor who has worked with Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, and Woody Allen" -- until I realized that Shelley Duvall also qualified.)

I had long wanted to see Three Days of the Condor because it is described as one of the "paranoid thrillers" of the early Seventies, but I can't honestly say that it matches up to the definitive examples directed by Alan J. Pakula (Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men). Pollack was always a craftsmanlike director, but I haven't yet seen a film of his that got my juices flowing.

It's the little things that make the difference. Owen Roizman's cinematography in Condor is effective, but scarcely at the brilliant level of Gordon Willis's work in the three Pakula films. Dave Grusin's music does nothing for Condor atmospherically -- it's just throwaway pop jazz -- while Michael Small's music in the first two Pakulas and David Shire's in the third contribute hugely to the ominous atmosphere of those movies.

Three Days of the Condor is based on a well-regarded novel by James Grady which I haven't looked at, but the plotting seems a little weak. Robert Redford's spy-on-the-run "reads" one situation involving a mail delivery really stupidly, so that key scene seems forced. The whole business about his roping in "innocent bystander" Faye Dunaway seemed to me a dramatic cul-de-sac, although it occupies a huge portion of the running time.

Where Condor pays off is in some of the dialogue exchanges. Redford has two great scenes late in the film, one with Max von Sydow as a civilized Belgian hit-man, the other with Cliff Robertson as a CIA executive; the latter scene is prescient in the way that Robertson lays it on the line about Peak Oil and resource depletion -- looking forward to roughly where we are now.