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.

This Day in Film History (‘The Way We Were’ Scores After Off-Screen Script Struggles)

Oct. 16, 1973— The Way We Were, a bittersweet, through-the-years drama starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, premiered at last in New York City, after undergoing multiple rewrites and backstage bickering that, miracle of miracles, resulted in a box-office hit and placement among the American Film Institute’s list of the top romantic movies.

The film also firmly established Redford—whose career had been inexorably building momentum for a decade—as the male romantic idol of his generation—ironically, for a role that, in its initial incarnation, he saw as such a “Ken doll” that he had rejected it.

More than a few fans of this classic might be surprised to learn that its heterosexual couple were a projection of the relationship between screenwriter Arthur Laurents and his lover of the late Forties and early Fifties, actor Farley Granger.

In both cases, a Jewish screenwriter with outspoken leftist sympathies (Laurents in real life, Streisand as the film’s Katie Morosky) falls in love with a WASP of startling good looks (Granger, and Redford’s Hubbell Gardiner), only to see the relationship founder. 

Streisand, committed to the project from the start, recognized that the film needed a male co-star of unusual magnetism. She thought she saw it in Redford, “an intellectual cowboy…a charismatic star who is also one of the finest actors of his generation.”

“What intrigued me most about Bob was his complexity,” Streisand recalls in her upcoming memoir, My Name Is Barbra (excerpted in the November issue of Vanity Fair). “You never quite know what he’s thinking, and that makes him fascinating to watch onscreen. Like the greatest movie stars, Bob understands the power of restraint. You’re never going to get it all…and that’s the mystery…that’s what makes you want to keep looking at him.”

To Streisand’s disappointment, Redford initially rejected the role as being little more than a love object. But she wouldn’t take no for an answer, beginning a process where as many as 10 screenwriters were enlisted (most crucially, Alvin Sargent, David Rayfiel, and even Paddy Chayefsky and Francis Ford Coppola) to make Katie more appealing and, more important, Hubbell a figure of substance and complexity.

With every rewrite, Laurents saw less of his original, and it infuriated him, particularly on what he saw as the softened subplot involving the Hollywood blacklist. Streisand and, to a lesser extent, Redford also objected to the de-emphasis on politics.

But director Sydney Pollack, already under enormous pressure from balancing the contrasting acting styles of his stars (Streisand loved constant rehearsals and additional takes; Redford felt he grew more stale the longer it lasted), battling with producer Ray Stark, and making sense of all the different scripts, was also getting static from Columbia Pictures, which desperately needed a hit to stave off bankruptcy.  

It all come to a head after a disastrous Friday night preview. Frustrated by his inability to integrate the passion and the politics, Pollack decided to cut five scenes—all with political overtones.

Nearly a decade later, Pollack would engage in another clash about the meaning of a movie with a significant figure: Dustin Hoffman, who saw Tootsie as being about what an actor would go through for his craft while the director conceived it as how a male could become a better man.

Both movies became enormous hits, but The Way We Were left a far more bitter residue. The outspoken Laurents remained bitter to the end of his life about the violence Pollack did to his script. For his part, the director felt that at the end of the day, the movie was a love story.

For all the battle over the movie’s words, a crucial contributor to its eventual success—in a way that audiences may not fully appreciate—is its theme music. I’m not talking simply about the fact that the song, with its nostalgia-tinged lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, won an Oscar for Best Original Song as well as the Grammy for Song of the Year.

No, I’m also referring to how it opened up audience tear ducts during the film’s ending. Composer Marvin Hamlisch, thinking the audience would grow tired of his theme after two hours, had used different music for the goodbye scene between Katie and Hubbell. At first, he couldn’t understand why audiences didn’t react the way he wanted.

When he realized the problem—they needed to hear that theme music again!—Columbia Pictures wouldn’t come up with the $15,000 cost of redoing the scene. So Hamlisch took it out of his own paycheck.

Did the studio suits ever recompense him? You got me. Maybe they thought that Oscar and Grammy were all the rewards he needed. In any case, that soaring ballad got a lot of people’s minds off a script that had given countless people agita.

(See Sarah Jae Leiber's interesting discussion on the Jewish Women's Archive about how The Way We Were concludes that "civility alone cannot sustain loving relationships where core principles are misaligned.")

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Tootsie,’ on the Plight of an Unemployed Actor)

Michael Dorsey, an actor (played by Dustin Hoffman): “Are you saying that nobody in New York will work with me?”

George Fields, his agent (played by Sydney Pollack): “No, no, that's too limited... nobody in Hollywood wants to work with you, either! I can't even set you up for a commercial. You played a tomato for 30 seconds--they went a half a day over schedule because you wouldn't sit down.”

Michael: “Of course. It was illogical.”

George: “YOU WERE A TOMATO. A tomato doesn't have logic. A tomato can't move.”

Michael: “That's what I said. So if he can't move, how's he gonna sit down, George? I was a stand-up tomato: a juicy, sexy, beefsteak tomato. Nobody does vegetables like me. I did an evening of vegetables off-Broadway. I did the best tomato, the best cucumber... I did an endive salad that knocked the critics on their ass.”—Tootsie (1982), story by Don McGuire and Larry Gelbart, screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal, with uncredited contributions by Robert Garland, Barry Levinson and Elaine May, directed by Sydney Pollack

Scenes such as this went far to ensure that the cross-dressing farce Tootsie—released 30 years ago yesterday—would not be a drag. Already, even before the Russian Tea Room scene (in the accompanying photo), when “Dorothy Michaels” reveals her true identity to Fields, you can understand why the astonished agent bursts out: “God, I begged you to get some therapy!” These lines are hilarious in and of themselves. But, given the grinding manner in which the film was made, they hold a special piquancy for me.

I have found Shirley MacLaine’s backhanded tribute to Terms of Endearment co-star Debra Winger’s “turbulent brilliance” to be problematic. Perhaps the younger actress was a pill to work with, before and after that film. But I can’t remember a similar description used about a male star.

Few have deserved that term more than Dustin Hoffman. But, as a star with proven box-office pull—not to mention several Oscar nominations and one win—the Tootsie “leading lady” probably got away with everything Winger did—and far more—without getting stuck with a term similarly deleterious to a career. “Difficult”? Yes, he has been so described—but not “turbulent.” A couple of clunkers in a row, especially early in his career, might have made him, like Michael Dorsey, radioactive in the film and theater community. But more often, he scored, as with Tootsie, for which he was nominated (yet again) for an Oscar.

What I found particularly great about this scene is that it acts as, in effect, a veiled commentary on the entire relationship between the star and the film’s director during shooting. From an appearance that Making Tootsie author Susan Dworkin made at my local library nearly 30 years ago, I learned that the two had vastly different senses of what the true story of the film was about. Sydney Pollack,  with a renewed appreciation of his wife and heightened feminism after a brief separation, felt that the script was about how playing a woman made Michael Dorsey a better man; Hoffman thought of the screenplay as a comic valentine about the lengths to which an actor will go simply to practice the craft he loves. In the end, both men got their wish in what the film conveyed, but not before clashes so fierce, continual and protracted that the two never made another film together.

Amazingly enough, though, it was Hoffman who convinced Pollack—a onetime actor who hadn’t appeared before the cameras in nearly two decades—to play the agent. The star told his agent that, in trying to convey the plight of Dorsey, he couldn’t accept that he was unemployable in hearing it from Pollack’s projected man for the role, Dabney Coleman. It’s interesting that Hoffman thought that he could believe this coming from a director.

After much convincing—including roses sent by the actor!—Pollack put aside his misgivings and acted. They are among the best scenes in the film, and make me wonder how Pollack's career might have turned out if he had more acting credits besides his largely TV work of the Fifties and early Sixties.

After years of perfectionism—and a stint at directing himself (in Straight Time) that he ended over chronic indecision during filming—Hoffman finally made his directing debut this year in the film Quartet. After all this time, he still can’t see how so many directors over the years got agita in working with him.(Pollack, he allows, was a "very good director," but not "collaborative," he told Simon Hattenstone of The Guardian recently. The director, now gone to his eternal reward, is not around to volunteer his opinion about the actor's endless requests for retakes.)

Well, no matter. Just this once, in Tootsie, we get the wonderful sense that Hoffman, in a rare moment of self-perception, recognized his most prominent professional trait, embraced it and sent it up, to wildly funny—classic, really—effect. I never lived through the knockdown battles he had with Pollack and others, so I can’t say if the experience was worth it for them. But for a viewer, it is.