Classic Movie Review: 'Three Days of the Condor'

Three Days of the Condor

Directed by Sydney Pollack

Written by Lorenzo Semple Jr., David Rayfiel

Starring Robert Redford, Cliff Robertson, Faye Dunaway, Max Von Sydow

Release Date September 25th, 1975

Published February 18th, 2025

Three Days of the Condor was released 50 years ago as I write this and yet it feels as alive, relevant, and prescient as ever. This spy thriller from the brilliant director Sydney Pollack posits a form of espionage based solely on wits and guts rather than bullets and explosions and it’s so much stronger for that. Centering the story around the mind of a savvy genius with a knack for code breaking, Three Days of the Condor uses the best traits of star Robert Redford, his wise eyes and movie star looks, and combines that with a premise that was straight out of a real life American thought experiment to create a spy thriller that remains a trenchant critique of American geo-politics to this day.

Robert Redford stars in Three Days of the Condor as Joe Turner, a normal enough guy who happens to work for an agency that is a cover for a CIA outpost. Turner is not a spy however, he’s just a genius who is capable of seeing patterns where others cannot. His job is to read books, articles, everything really, and look for potential plots that could affect global politics. His most recent discovery appears to be an ingenious way to destabilize a Middle Eastern government while stealing its valuable resources, specifically oil.

Turner’s theory is so accurate that it leads to everyone in his office getting murdered by men eager to keep Turner’s theory under wraps. It seems someone was actually using this very tactic to undermine a Middle Eastern government with the ultimate goal of securing oil reserves for an American company. Turner himself would also be dead if he had not stepped out briefly to pick up lunch for the office. Upon his return, the killers have left but everyone in the office is dead. Turner grabs a gun from the office and flees the scene.

From here, Turner follows CIA protocols, he calls the office and informs them of what happened. We learn that his codename is Condor and that what he’s telling the higher ups has caught everyone by surprise. This, in fact, may not be a CIA plot. It appears some outsider may be using agency tactics and contacts to carry out the very plot that Joe had uncovered. As more bodies pile up, Joe goes on the run, eventually taking a hostage, Kathy (Faye Dunaway), and hiding in her apartment while he figures out his next move. All the while, a calculating hitman, Joubert (Max Von Sydow), tracks his every move. But which side is Joubert actually on?

Three Days of the Condor packs one intriguing question on top of another as it takes elements of the story of the Vietnam whistleblower Daniel Ellsworth and combines it with a hint of The French Connection, in terms of violence and gritty scene setting, and a little Alfred Hitchcock, in terms of an everyman stand-in facing a conspiracy plot well beyond his understanding. Holding it all together is Redford, a stalwart audience avatar, a beloved movie star who is easy to invest in. He’s easy to like and root.

The script and direction of Three Days of the Condor then smartly crafts scenarios that allow Redford to express Turner’s wit and intelligence. His job may not have trained him for shooting a gun but it has given him more than a few lessons in spycraft and misdirection. He’s just smart enough to follow the right clues and just inexperienced enough to make him hard to track as he doesn’t make the kind of choices a well trained spy would make. It makes him difficult to anticipate but not impossible and what develops is a clever cat and mouse plot and a terrific game of chess that is utterly captivating.

Three Days of the Condor is electric filmmaking, a lightning strike thriller unlike any other of the time. The script by Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Rayfiel speculated on real life theories from politicians, spies, and think tanks which were speculating on the future of war and economics. It feels eerie when it’s revealed that Joe Turner’s theory about destabilizing a Middle Eastern government for the purpose of securing that country’s oil reserves is revealed. The film was made in 1975 and appears to predict both the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and the war in Iraq in 1991 and again in the early 2000s.

But Three Days of the Condor is not based on a lucky guess or magical psychic powers. In reality, American think tanks have speculated publicly about the need to tap Middle Eastern oil reserves by any means necessary since at least the 1960s. We’ve learned in the past couple of decades that people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had been recommending plans to invade the Middle East since well before they became members of the Reagan and subsequent Bush administrations. This information was always out there in Conservative media, newspaper op-eds, and think tank essays.

I mention all of this not to undermine the genius of Three Days of the Condor but as a sign of how brilliant the movie is. The film speculates insightfully on real life geopolitics and offered a prescient warning of what was bubbling visibly just under the surface of real life modern American politics. That the film also happens to be an exceptionally well made spy movie centered on a career best performance from one of the greatest movie stars of all time, is, well, a form of Hollywood magic if not actual magic.

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