Robert Redford’s definitive spy thriller

Robert Redford was famously cast in Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a nod to paranoid ‘70s thrillers, but it’s easy to dismiss this inclusion as another example of Marvel’s puddle-deep cultural referencing. Sure, it’s great to see Redford bring his smooth, unfussy professionalism into the MCU, but casting him isn’t exactly proof of Winter Soldier’s genre bona fides. (See also: filmmakers referring to What’s Up, Doc? as an influence on Ant-Man and the Wasp seemingly because they’re both set in San Francisco.) Yet the shorthand is also understandable — almost entirely because of Three Days of the Condor, more or less the only paranoid ‘70s thriller Redford actually made.

Yes, All the President’s Men, also starring Redford, has kinship with movies like Condor, The Parallax View (with Warren Beatty), and Marathon Man (with All the President’s Men co-star Dustin Hoffman). But it’s more of a journalistic procedural than a flat-out thriller. Similarly, Sneakers is an early-’90s echo of those ‘70s films, using Redford in much the same way Winter Soldier does, as an emblem of a bygone era. Redford’s other thrillers of the ‘70s skewed more comic, like The Hot Rock or The Sting. That just leaves 1975’s Condor, turning 50 just a few weeks after Redford’s passing, as his signature contribution to this era-specific genre.

At first, the movie makes the New York City CIA office where Joe Turner (Redford) works appear downright cozy, thanks to its disguise as the American Literary Historical Society. True to its front, the employees there are tweedier types, assigned to read print media, feed it into a computer, and search for signs of leaks, spy codes, and so forth. Then, early in the film, almost everyone at the office is killed by a trio of assassins, who accidentally leave only Joe (codenamed Condor) alive. He habitually uses an unauthorized back exit, so the killers staking out the place don’t see him step out for lunch.

When Joe discovers this massacre, he frantically follows procedure, but grows skittish when the CIA doesn’t bring him in immediately. His mind races: Is he being investigated? Framed? Or was it one of his recent reports that attracted this attention in the first place? Though the timeframe is shortened from the source novel — there, it was Six Days of the Condor — the story only gets more convoluted as it unfolds. To contemporary audiences, many of the details may nonetheless seem rote, because plenty of movies have knocked this one off over the past half-century (including Winter Soldier). What makes Three Days of the Condor a more memorable experience than most of the films it influenced is how much time it dedicates to Redford thinking on camera, as he must plot for his own safety on the fly.

Redford’s good looks and charisma made certain he’d never be known principally for playing brainiac characters, and some of his roles are indeed guys who operate more on instinct than smarts. (Even in Sneakers, where he leads a crew of tech nerds, he’s more the frontman; techier guys are constantly explaining how things actually work.) But in contrast to his rawer, more street-level peers like Al Pacino or Robert De Niro, Redford has an even-keeled, considered performing style that could project a baseline intelligence. He often delivers dialogue as if he has chosen his words carefully. Even when Joe is in over his head (which is most of the time), Redford creates a sense of trust that he’s at least trying to figure things out.

Image: Paramount Pictures

Joe’s most improbable decision is to kidnap Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway), a stranger, entirely because they have no prior connection to each other. The screenplay’s most improbable decision is to have Kathy develop genuine affection for Joe even after he’s held her at gunpoint, invaded her apartment, and tied her up for hours. The believability of this scenario is debated by George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez inside the trunk of a car in Out of Sight, and whether that movie intended to or not, it has effectively supplanted Three Days of the Condor as an example of movie-star chemistry overriding situational tension to create a convincing insta-love story. Still, Dunaway and Redford share some surprisingly (perhaps illogically) tender moments as Kathy gets caught up in Joe’s impromptu plans.

Maybe director Sydney Pollack had some residual bittersweetness from having recently directed Redford in the romance The Way We Were. He doesn’t rely exclusively on noirish shadows to create an atmosphere of paranoia, instead often bringing menacing figures into broad daylight, dressed like postal workers or accompanying presumed friends. The film is set during the holiday season, so there are Christmas jingles and decorations throughout, though (in realistic New York City fashion) no snow. The movie is slickly made — it was Oscar-nominated for editing — but not ostentatious about it, befitting Joe’s style. (Redford’s style was obviously more supernaturally handsome, but he somehow manages to downplay his looks without disguising them in the least.)

Image: Paramount Pictures

Despite its deserved status as a genre touchstone, Three Days of the Condor’s brand of paranoia is relatively anodyne. It doesn’t particularly indict the CIA so much as acknowledge the potential for conspiracies to tunnel their way through the agency’s ranks. The most outlandish character, the European assassin Joubert (Max Von Sydow), turns out to be one of the film’s most interesting, and emblematic of what the filmmakers seem to ultimately find unnerving: the man willing to join in the CIA’s gaming out of various scenarios, with no loyalty to a particular government, country, or ideology. Late in the movie, Joubert explains his freelancing to Joe: “The belief is in your own precision.” It’s supposed to be chilling, though it has an insidious appeal, too — maybe because it comes towards the end of a movie with exactly that drive. Among paranoid thrillers, Three Days of the Condor isn’t as existential as The Conversation or as bleak as The Parallax View; it probably has less to actually say about its era than either. But the belief in its own precision is there, and justified.

Three Days of the Condor is currently streaming on MGM+.