The Bourne movies lifted a lot of their MO from Three Days of the Condor, one of the key political conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s. Behind the scenes the way the film was financed – sold before it was even made – would change the way the film industry worked in the 1980s, but Sydney Pollack’s loose shooting style and fast edits intercutting action with depictions of slickly professional characters doing what they do, that looks even further into the future.
This is also peak Robert Redford, who plays a desk jockey for some branch of the secret service who goes out to lunch one day and comes back to find that everyone in the office is dead, the victims of a hit that’s somehow forgotten to include him in its sweep.
The rest of the movie is Redford’s Turner trying to stay alive while also discovering who’s responsible for the slaughter and en route kidnapping Faye Dunaway’s innocent-bystander Kathy so he can hide out at her place. They fall for each other, need that even be said?
Turner is established as the super-decent super-geeky moped-riding analyst with a Chinese girlfriend (so very liberal), who’s well adjusted in spite of his bookish nerdiness – gets on with the guys and so on – and in the brief section before mayhem arrives it’s also made entirely clear that he has no spycraft whatsoever. But he learns fast, almost as if, Bourne-style, it lived inside him waiting to be activated. Here the film falls into a gulf of plausibility, but then Turner is meant to be very, very smart as well as handsome and cultured and this is Robert Redford and so…
Pollack gives it plenty of New York City atmosphere and Dave Grusin’s cool, jazzy score gave it, at the time, a patina of fresh fashionability, which feels as vintage now as the blocky, teleprinter-style credits – wallow in that period detail.
Because it’s set in the run-up to Christmas, it can slotted into that jokey movie-buff list of Christmas movies that aren’t really Christmas movies (Die Hard etc) and buffs will also have several kittens over the fact that Max von Sydow is in it, so well dressed, hair cut so impeccably, it’s almost funny, as the bad guy behind everything.
Being a 1970s conspiracy thriller, the rot goes all the way to the top, it’s suggested, with the CIA portrayed as being deeply compromised. By the end what’s going on is out in the open but there is a distinct lack of resolution, especially for Turner. There is a “to be continued…” aspect in this film, as if rottenness in bits of the state machinery isn’t a bug it’s a feature.
You’ll balk at Redford and Dunaway’s romantic sequences all backlit and very soft of focus – a desperate man and the woman he’s just kidnapped, really? And her character being portrayed as a neurotic bag of damaged goods also seems a bit questionable, as if Kathy exists just to make Turner look better. “Miscast,” said esteemed critic Pauline Kael at the time, but miswritten is closer to the problem.
Against Kael’s misgivings – the movie was “no real fun” she said – the film was a hit and remains highly watchable, partly on account of its time-capsule quality, but also because of the things it does wrong (that relationship) and right (Redford and Von Sydow, Pollack and Grusin).
Essential viewing, if you’re pigging out on conspiracy thrillers. Follow up with The Conversation and The Parallax View, All the President’s Men and perhaps the maddest and possibly most ironic of them all, Winter Kills. That’s a good weekend’s worth in anybody’s money.
Three Days of the Condor – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
