3 Days of the Condor

3 Days of the Condor is a product of its era: the 1970s, when conspiracy was the watchword. Based on the novel Six Days of the Condor (Hollywood condensed the action), this 1975 film finds a hapless CIA analyst (Robert Redford) on the run when his office is targeted and every coworker is systematically assassinated. Desperate to find out who's behind the attack—and why—before the assassin (the cool and unemotional Max von Sydow) closes in, he finds himself caught between two factions within “the Company,” neither of which he trusts. The political conspiracy is more convincing than the love story: is it Stockholm Syndrome that makes Faye Dunaway fall in love with Redford's spy who comes in from the cold and holds her hostage in her own apartment, or just the fact that he's such a dreamboat? But the atmosphere of suspicion and distrust of anything the government says is perfectly in tune with the backwash of Vietnam and Watergate. Director Sydney Pollack keeps the story moving, while Redford is convincing as a regular (if really, really smart) guy who's in way over his head (there's a wry humor in having a deskbound analyst escaping trained killer agents simply by applying what he's learned from reading CIA memos and pulp novels). While not in the same league with The Conversation or The Parallax View, 3 Days of the Condor is a fine ‘70s conspiracy thriller. The Blu-ray release preserves the subdued color and coarser grain of the film stock that gave so many ‘70s films that distinctive “realistic look,” used here for on-location NYC street shooting. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)