Three Days of the Condor
Sydney Pollack certainly glided from one genre to another. After The Way We Were, he did a film about Japanese organized crime, The Yakuza, and then did an espionage thriller, Three Days of the Condor, which again teamed him with Robert Redford. It's a taut, well-executed film, with a few notable flaws.
Redford plays a researcher for the CIA. He's not a spy, he reads spy novels and analyzes the plots. When he returns from lunch one day to his New York office, he finds all of his colleagues have been murdered. When he reaches out to the CIA brass for help to come in safely, he learns that he can trust no one.
This film, made in 1975, is precursor to the fast editing style that is old-hat these days. Some one actually took a stopwatch to the thing and the average cut lasts about five seconds, but it doesn't feel jittery or jumpy. Instead it's very gripping, and manages to make Redford's paranoia an effective over-riding theme. There is also a chilling performance by Max Von Sydow as a free-lance assassin who changes allegiances based on whomever is paying him. He has a great speech at the end about how he finds his job peaceful.
Where the film fails is the use of Faye Dunaway as the "girl." Redford, on the lam, picks her out at random at a sporting goods store and holds her hostage, hiding out in her apartment. All well and good, but before the night is over they have a sexual relationship, and this is a mistake. I can buy that she would come to see his side of things and help him out, but willingly falling into bed with a man who has just held you at gunpoint is far-fetched, and more than a bit misogynistic.
Also, this film is dated a bit by the music and the overall look of the film. Dave Grusin's score is a kind of wocketa-wocketa thing that seemed more like something you'd hear in a Quinn Martin TV show, and the the photography and design don't elevate much above TV movie quality, either.
Finally, as someone who is familiar with New York City, the ease at which people find parking spaces exactly right in front of where they want to go is in the realm of fantasy.
All well and good, but before the night is over they have a sexual relationship, and this is a mistake. I can buy that she would come to see his side of things and help him out, but willingly falling into bed with a man who has just held you at gunpoint is far-fetched, and more than a bit misogynistic.
ReplyDeleteI dunno about that. I can see the male-fantasy aspect of it as written but I think this is precisely where casting Dunaway is an asset. She played several characters during that era that were less uptight about sex, in Network going so far as to play a character that spelled out how she approached sex more like a man would.
I think she carried it off without it being "misogynistic." And it helped that the screenplay allowed her to think that he was misogynistic.