Flashback, September 1975: Redford Paranoid Thriller ‘Three Days of the Condor’ Opens

Three months after the Rockefeller Commission released its report documenting abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Three Days of the Condor was released 50 years ago this week, further heightening audiences’ fears about a secret government agency run amok.

The movie, which starred Robert Redford, brought in $27 million in box-office revenues on a budget of $20 million, cementing the actor’s status as the premier leading man of the mid-1970s after it had been temporarily disrupted by the underperforming The Great Gatsby.

The film was an adaptation of the James Grady novel Six Days of the Condor. Though there were numerous changes from page to screen (itemized in Allan MacInnis’s 2011 post from the “Alienated in Vancouver” blog), the most significant might have been the time compression indicated by the title.

Peter Yates, who worked with Redford three years before on The Hot Rock, was originally set to direct. But he was replaced by Sydney Pollack, who had collaborated with the star on The Way We Were and would make a total of seven films with him.

Pollack’s “great gift,” Redford said in a Time Magazine interview after his friend’s death in 2008, was “to cover what could have been just sort of crass commercial filmmaking with a whole artistic [approach] that was more abstracted and was more hip and was more offbeat.”

In Pollack’s filmography, the movie resembling this the most might be The Pelican Brief, another slick thriller featuring the biggest box-office star of the time (Tom Cruise) and the requisite love interest (Jeanne Tripplehorn).

Redford’s character, Joe Turner, goes out to pick up lunch for his colleagues at the fictitious American Literary Historical Society (a CIA cover), only to discover upon his return that all his coworkers have been slaughtered. Following a planned attempt to “come in from the cold” that nearly ends with his own assassination, he goes on the run to save his life and ferret out the truth

Reflecting in some manner the film’s plot, the atmosphere on the set was “tense,” according to this recollection by photographer Terry O’Neill, “mainly because the film was very topical, New York City was a bleak place in 1974, the President [Nixon] had just resigned, and the former head of the CIA [Richard Helms] was supposedly on set talking to Robert Redford.” 

That turned out to be the case, as the actor was, with as little fanfare as possible, eliciting from Helms inside tips about his former agency.

Redford’s Turner is supposed to be bookish and slightly naïve as he pores over books in his unsecured office.

But Redford being Redford, he doesn’t look the slightest bit nerdy, an impression enhanced by his stylishly casual apparel: flared denim, a gold and gray wool tie, and a gray tweed herringbone jacket that fostered such a fashion trend that “all menswear guys have tried to copy this jacket,” said French designer Nicolas Gabard, according to Charles Teasdale’s retrospective on the film this month in The Financial Times.

I guess the filmmakers needed something to make it plausible that Faye Dunaway’s Kathy would fall for this stranger who abducts her in his frantic attempt to stay alive—not normal behavior for most women in similar circumstances.

But for all that, the plot was taut and the conspiracy details not especially far-fetched—especially so for 1970s audiences who were learning daily, through the evening news, to distrust whatever the government was telling them. 

Though Dunaway did not experience with Redford or Pollack the animosity she had encountered with Roman Polanski on Chinatown, her role was also hardly as complex or extensive as in that classic neo-noir. Nor was she able to rehearse or emotionally bond much with Redford, who was already busy with pre-production on All the President’s Men.

That adaptation of the Bob Woodward-Carl Bernstein bestseller about how they broke the Watergate story was a real-life version of the “paranoid” or “conspiracy” thriller genre that became so prominent in the Seventies.

Such movies as The Parallax View, The Conversation, Klute, and Winter Kills marked a sharp turn away from nail-biters from a few decades before, when—at least on film—the U.S. government protected its citizens from foreign agents infiltrating the U.S. (Additionally, two Godfather movies and Chinatown evinced cynicism about Law and Order, American style.)

Now, with revelations of Presidential deceit about Watergate and Vietnam—not to mention the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr.—the American government and private companies with access to high-tech equipment and secrets were being depicted as nefarious.

Unlike wartime and later “conspiracy” movies, Three Days of the Condor was neither blithely optimistic nor pessimistic. Its “open” ending about Turner’s fate was, however, deeply disquieting—in effect, leaving it up to the public to defend against attacks on the liberty of institutions as much as on individuals, from whatever quarter.