Off-List: Tre Døgn for Condor
I recall
having watched “Three Days of the Condor” ages ago, so when this movie popped
up as a 1975 movie not on the List, I knew I had to add it. As it turned out,
most of the things I thought I remembered from the movie turned out to be wrong
and this was very much like watching the movie for the first time. Only the
image of a worried Robert Redford with big glasses held true.
Fortunately,
“Three Days of the Condor” is as good as I remember, especially the opening
half hour is very promising. Joe Turner (Robert Redford), codenamed Condor,
works at a CIA office looking for intelligence clues in books and magazines
from around the world. They simply read them and scan them electronically.
Sounds very 21st century, but using old, noisy and very unwieldy
machinery. One day while Joe is out to pick up lunch, a hit squad headed by the
mysterious Joubert (Max von Sydow), takes out the entire office. That sort of
ruins Joe’s day. He is not a field agent and is confused on what to do. The
obvious thing is to call the head office for help, but when the agent sent to
bring him in wants to kill him, Joe realizes that this was an inside job, and
he probably cannot trust anybody.
Of course
he hooks up with a pretty girl (Faye Dunaway), who does not believe him, but
eventually is won our by the immense Redford charm (oh dear…) and Joe goes from
hunted to hunter as he sets out to find those who killed his colleagues.
That first
half hour is phenomenal, but then “Three Days of the Condor” moves into
template-land. Maybe I have just watched too many spy/conspiracy thrillers, and
I am a bit hard on it. To me it felt as if the steam came off around the middle
part and the entire girl hostage part is mostly unnecessary but quite predictable.
They just had to bring in a love interest. Then comes the unravelling of the
conspiracy and again the story gets tighter. There are some interesting and
mildly puzzling things around the Joubert character. A hitman who is professional
to the fingertips, entirely cold on his kills, with no other loyalty than his
job, but outside the job jovial and entirely ordinary. The way Joe Turner is a
regular guy with an odd job, so is Joubert.
The targets
of this movie are the power games casually played by agencies like CIA. The hit
was orchestrated by a renegade group within CIA (ups, spoiler…), but not more
renegade than having opinions and employing methods condoned by the larger CIA.
This makes the larger organization just as guilty as the renegade operation,
and Joe learns there is really no difference.
In the wake
of Watergate and a number of other shenanigans, “Three Days of the Condor”
tapped into a general sentiment of distrust toward the power structures, which
anchors it in this period, but the theme has been persistent and works just as
well today. Conspiracies, or at least the suspicion of conspiracies are very much
alive and well today and while many belongs to the fringe, there are enough
crazy stunts around the world to feed Hollywood for decades to come.
Shake off
the clichés and template structure and “Three Days of the Condor” is highly
entertaining. It has its eye-rolling moments, but there is enough meat here to
keep me going and yeah, I admit it, I read a lot of these stories in my youth.
Not exactly
Academy material, but you could do a lot worse than watching “Three Days of the
Condor”.