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Parent Issue
Day
5
Month
November
Year
1975
OCR Text

Three Days of the Condor

With Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, Max Von Sydow, John Houseman.  Produced by Stanley Schneider.  Directed by Sidney Pollack.  Screenplay by Lorenzo Semple, Jr., and David Rayfield.  Rated R.  At several local theatres.

     Director Sydney Pollack, working from James Grady's novel, Six Days of the Condor, has come up with the first contemporary CIA intrigue film.  lt's surprising, perhaps, that the idea--a natural extension of the mystery and spy genres--took so long to be realized, but the endless wave of headlines in recent months concerning new revelations about our super agency has apparently now prepared a mass market for it.

     Fortunately, unlike the James Bond series and other earlier efforts in the international-intrigue field, the hero of Pollack's film (Robert Redford) is not the agent par excellence, pulling off the impossible assignment and entertaining us along the way with his macho exploits, but a relatively innocent "reader" in a New York CIA front organization who ends up pitting himself against the whole Company.

     It is indeed a sign of the times that Pollack doesn't attempt to romanticize the CIA or glorify its role, as so many earlier films about police, the FBI, and the Armed Forces have done.  Actually, CIA people, with the exception of Redford, are portrayed accurately (one must surmise) as responsible only to the concept of total control at any cost, unmindful of the principles involved or who has to die in the process.  They are portrayed in their actual roles as manipulators of the news, masters of deceit, and cold-blooded murderers.

     On the level of an action-filled spy intrigue, exclusive of weightier considerations, the film is crisp, fascinating, and entertaining.  Hopefully, these qualities will encourage more people to seek substantial factual information on the real CIA--which, sad to say, is a hundred times colder and more terrifying in its actual operations than anything in this film would indicate.

                     --Derek VanPelt

 

Image caption:  Robert Redford on the spot