three days of the condor (sydney pollack, 1975)
Saturday, April 25, 2020
As I was watching this movie, I thought that I should make a list of my favorite Robert Redford movies. But when I looked at his movies that I have seen, I realized I'm not a fan. I thought he was great carrying the film All Is Lost, I liked Avengers: Endgame (although as I recall, Redford was barely in it, and he certainly wasn't the reason to watch the film), and I have an inordinate fondness for The Chase, and Redford was fine in that although he got a bit lost amidst that amazing cast (Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Angie Dickinson, James Fox, Robert Duvall, Miriam Hopkins, even songwriter Paul Williams). But I hated Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and didn't like The Way We Were very much, either. Still, I understand my impulse to make a long list of fave Redford films ... even after writing this paragraph, I don't dislike the guy.
I could say the same thing about Sydney Pollack, although it would never occur to me in the first place to list my faves of his movies. He directed The Way We Were ... he won an Oscar for Out of Africa, which did not impress me. The only movie of his I liked unreservedly was Tootsie.
And I think of myself as a Faye Dunaway fan, but really that comes from Chinatown and my beloved Bonnie and Clyde. Besides, she's not particularly good, here, although she isn't given a lot to work with. The "romance" between her and Redford fizzles rather than sizzles.
So, what do we have? Another of those paranoid thrillers that were so common at the time (The Parallax View, The Conversation, All the President's Men). Three Days of the Condor is an OK way to spend a couple of hours, but the thriller aspect wasn't very thrilling, and what passes for gender politics here can be summed up by the way Redford's character introduces himself to Dunaway's character by kidnapping her, tying her up, and gagging her ... naturally they end up fucking (and if you think I'm being crude, Dunaway herself at one point refers to herself as a "spy fucker").
There is this contribution to pop culture, though:
Comments