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00:17A little break down of the security there.
00:21What are you doing?
00:47Mixing Hitchcock and New Hollywood and still searingly relevant, Three Days of the Condor
00:53is a journey into the dark heart of America.
00:56Dizzyingly brilliant, Sidney Pollack's thriller starts with one of the great opening sequences
01:01in cinema.
01:02Robert Redford's bookish New York researcher returns from lunch to find his entire office
01:07has been assassinated.
01:09And he is well aware that the killers are going to want to tie up any loose ends.
01:14How would you describe the political climate in America that Three Days of the Condor opens
01:19in?
01:20Well, it was very complex.
01:22The American had been through something of a political upheaval through Vietnam and
01:27then into Watergate.
01:28There was a sense of trauma in the air that this great nation could no longer trust its
01:33governing bodies.
01:35It was this idea that corruption could be found at the highest level.
01:39people.
01:39We can't trust our president even.
01:41We can't trust, you know, where to go next.
01:43And this began to filter down right through the whole of the way the nation worked.
01:49You know, from elections to the media, it was a kind of shockwave and it was like a wake
01:57a wake-up call.
02:06It was a wake-up call.
02:48The American Literary Historical Society is covered for an arm of the CIA scanning publications
02:54for secret codes and they've cracked one code too many.
03:00America at the time, and I'm old enough to say this, was in a kind of Watergate frenzy.
03:07And Watergate happened over the course of 71 to 73.
03:11And just to say what Watergate was, Watergate was the President of the United States, Richard
03:18Nixon, issuing from the Oval Office a burglary on the Democratic National Headquarters in the
03:26Watergate complex in Washington.
03:29Now, you know, we see that and we go, okay, it's Watergate.
03:32What it was, was the political, I think in my whole lifetime, the biggest political dynamite
03:40in the world, because then you realize the President of the United States, the person we
03:45elected is head of the FBI, he commands the military, this guy can do what he wants.
03:53And so the atmosphere in the United States at that time was the people begins, the Constitution
04:01begins, we, the people, but it isn't about we, the people.
04:06So it was all of that.
04:08And then you combine the Vietnam War, which was something that nobody voted for, and the
04:14boys of my generation were drafted into the civil rights era with all of us in the street.
04:21All of this is around in the atmosphere, all of this, and you top it off with the fact
04:28that the President of the United States is running a covert operation.
04:35Nobody knows about it, the FBI is involved, where in the hell are we?
04:41It's very hard to capture the, the sense that was in the country then, because we, we thought
04:48we were going way out on a limb when we did this.
04:53I mean, there was all of this suspicion about the CIA, but the degree of what we now call
05:01dirty tricks.
05:04The knowledge that we have now, we didn't have then, all of those things had not been published
05:09in fact.
05:09And as a matter of fact, some of them were published the week that we were shooting in
05:14front of the New York Times itself.
05:19So working with the writers, we were always a little bit worried that we were, that we
05:26were going a little too far out on a limb when we came up with this oil thing.
05:32And of course it was, it turned out to be very prescient because very, very shortly was
05:37the big, the big oil embargo happened and the, and the oil crisis happened as a matter
05:44of fact.
05:44And we began to realize that a lot of our strategic decisions politically were, were based on energy
05:52and oil.
05:53But at the time there was an enormous amount of, of cynicism about it.
06:00Released in 1975, amidst the aftershocks of Watergate, this sublime exercise in paranoia
06:06takes us on the run with Redford.
06:08Over three terrifying days, he must evade the killers, clear his own name, and root out
06:14a conspiracy that goes to the very heart of the organization he works for.
06:18So in 1975, when Three Days of the Condor comes out, it's a deeply sort of fractured situation
06:25in America at the time, politically.
06:27You have a younger generation of filmmakers who come in, sort of the first generation
06:32who come from a proper film school background, and who are looking at the works of European
06:36filmmakers, but who maybe most importantly are forged in the fires of the beginnings of
06:41the counterculture period, and who care about politics.
06:45And if the generation before was a bit more cautious and careful about what they said in
06:50their movies, this generation was more loud about it.
06:54The public had lost faith in the government and also the institutions associated with the
07:00government, really from 1969 onwards.
07:03And so the first quarter of the 70s was a kind of sea change in their opinions and their faith.
07:13Amongst those reasons were the release of the Pentagon Papers, which showed the extent of
07:20America's involvement in the Vietnam War, and of course, the Watergate scandal.
07:25The interesting thing about this particular period from the point of view of Hollywood was that,
07:30as the cynicism grew amongst the general population, it coincided with the growth of the new independent directors.
07:41They suddenly arose, largely as a result of the success of Easy Rider, but it did break open the stranglehold
07:50of the studios,
07:50which were sort of fading anyway.
07:52And so you had directors like Robert Altman, Sidney Pollock, Alan Pakula, all those guys who came up and
08:02actually could call their own shots and they could deal with material that previously would have been thought
08:08subversive and would not have got greenlit.
08:12This was a great moment for them because it meant they could start dealing with really serious topical issues.
08:17And Three Days of the Condor was really the first one to deal with the impact of the CIA dirty
08:27tricks.
08:27In Pollock's hands, it is a thriller built around character.
08:32Not only Redford's conflicted hero, but Faye Dunaway as the innocent woman caught up in his panic.
08:38Cliff Robertson as the contemptuous face of the CIA.
08:42And Max von Sydow as a wonderfully debonair assassin.
08:46So Three Days of the Condor has to set up an enormous amount very, very quickly.
08:51How do you describe the opening sequence?
08:54Well, I think if you want to teach young filmmakers about how to begin a film, how to start a
09:01thriller,
09:01how to put all your pieces in place visually, look at the Three Days of the Condor.
09:06It's a brilliant opening.
09:08And it's almost casually done.
09:10Sidney Pollock is so adept at making things feel at ease before he pulls the rug out.
09:14So what you have is Robert Redford, who seems to be some kind of bookworm at this American Literary Historical
09:21Society,
09:22who clearly aren't any kind of literary society at all.
09:27They have something to do with the government.
09:29This is kind of unclear.
09:30He arrives at work a little late.
09:32We get this idea of him being, you know, not a rebel, but certainly one who pushes the system a
09:38little bit.
09:38So what this society does, and we kind of very quickly realize it must be part of the government and
09:44it becomes clear it's part of the CIA,
09:46is that they analyze text publications for traces of conspiracy, for ideas that might give propaganda,
09:54for anything that doesn't seem to read well and raise it for the CIA.
09:59Now, this was a fictional idea brought up in the novel, but it was so powerful that apparently the KGB
10:04then took it on board once they'd seen Three Days of the Condor.
10:07They said, well, we're going to do that.
10:08So clearly, you know, this is a way things can be spread.
10:37This is a major.
10:39This is Joe Turner. Listen.
10:40Identification?
10:41What?
10:42Identification.
10:43My name is Turner.
10:44I work for you.
10:45Now listen.
10:45Identify yourself.
10:47I don't...
10:48What is your designation?
10:50Uh, Condor.
10:51Section 9, Department 17.
10:53The section's been hit.
10:54What level?
10:55What level?
10:56Level of damage.
10:57Everybody.
10:58The context in which this film was made is critical.
11:01America had been torn apart by the scandals of Vietnam, Watergate, and Nixon's downfall.
11:07A sub-genre of psychologically-taught thrillers fed off this political climate.
11:12Films such as Clute, The Parallax View, and The Conversation.
11:17Three Days of the Condor couldn't be more timely.
11:21And so suddenly this whole idea of conspiracy, of trust, was the big talking point everywhere you went.
11:27And so how did Hollywood react to that?
11:29Well, I think there's never been a filmmaking era where the style of film has been so attuned to the
11:37real political climate in America.
11:40What we got in the 1970s, what was called New Hollywood, was a complete reaction to Watergate and Nixon, to
11:46Vietnam, to this idea of we aren't good or bad.
11:51We aren't black or white.
11:52And the studios reacted in a very unusual way.
11:55They made very artistic, very intense, very clever films.
11:59We couldn't get to the sea.
12:00I mean, the problem was that there is no sea.
12:04I mean, you know, it's like trying to pick up water in your hand.
12:08You make phone calls and you get shunted around.
12:11Now, I tried to do a certain amount of research before this started, and I hired a researcher.
12:18And all we could do is sort of corroborate what James had corroborated, which was that there was a station
12:27in the CIA that were bookworms,
12:31whose job it was to check leaks and also get ideas from reading these books.
12:37But beyond that, you know, there was nothing much I could do.
12:41Sidney Pollack starred out as an actor.
12:44He's from the Midwest, like me, and you decide to go to New York, this sort of mecca of madness.
12:51And he gets involved with the neighborhood playhouse, Sanford Meisner, a kind of parallel to the actor's studio.
12:59In other words, it was very prestigious in not a formal sense, but in the sense of the new theater,
13:06the kind of working class open theater.
13:10And he's so good at the neighborhood playhouse that Meisner makes him his assistant, which is quite stunning.
13:18And then he goes to Hollywood and John Frankenheimer, who is his friend, says, come and do.
13:27He says, come out to Hollywood and work with the actors out there, because a lot of them are Hollywood
13:32actors and they need to sort of get the diction together, how to speak and all of that.
13:39So come out and work with me on that. So he's out there working with the actors.
13:43And Burt Lancaster says to him, no, actually, you're a director.
13:47And I suppose Burt Lancaster was watching him work with the actors.
13:51So he decides to do some directing and he gets to do Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
13:56He does The Twilight Zone, where a lot of people sort of, you know, get their first taste of things
14:02because it came out every week, anthology series.
14:05You're working with New York actors a lot. So the whole sort of training. And he knows that.
14:10On that trail, he meets Robert Redford, who'd also done A Twilight Zone, and they become friends.
14:17Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis optioned the novel Six Days of the Condor by James Grady, hoping for a new
14:24take on James Bond.
14:26Screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Junior added relevance. He both streamlined and complicated the story.
14:32He moved the Washington setting to a grittier New York. He switched the hidden MacGuffin from drug dealing to oil.
14:40And he added a sense of urgency, even speeding up the pace of the title. Three days is plenty, he
14:46declared.
14:46So the book Six Days of the Condor was an air sort of airport bestseller.
14:52It was popular as genre books were at the time, especially espionage thrillers.
14:57So it comes out in 1974. And by 1975, it's been adapted for the screen. It's a pretty quick turnaround.
15:03And a lot of that was down to the producer Dino De Laurentiis, who saw an opportunity for this kind
15:08of material and knew that in the spirit of America at this time and in general, the idea of espionage
15:16and who can you trust was a big theme.
15:18His key decision was the first choice of screenwriter. He brought in a man called Lorenzo Semple Junior, who was
15:25a wily old Hollywood screenwriter, but he had written The Parallax View, which had been very successful.
15:30A Warren Beatty paranoid political thriller came out a couple of years beforehand. He knew the terrain. And he made
15:38some very sensible decisions with this pulpy novel.
15:40Because he was a really good writer and again, a good reader of the media, he changed the MacGuffin. In
15:47the book, it's all about drug dealing.
15:49So the central conspiracy is a man at the CIA who's kind of infiltrating drug dealing for his own evil
15:55ends.
15:55What Semple Junior did was he changed it to oil. So the CIA are trying to manipulate countries who are
16:02making developing oil, very topical, very on what was going on currently, you know, in the world in terms of
16:08real politic.
16:09So this pulpy thriller instantly became a film and a story of the moment.
16:15Initially, Warren Beatty was set to star with Peter Yates directing, but Redford's interest changed everything.
16:21He informed De Laurentiis that his old friend Sidney Pollock had to direct.
16:27After The Way We Were and Jeremiah Johnson, this was the third of seven films Redford would make with Pollock,
16:33one of the great actor director partnerships.
16:35The original project had Warren Beatty as Joe, and it was to be directed by Peter Yates, who'd done Bullet.
16:42When Warren Beatty left the project, Dino brought in Robert Redford.
16:49Robert Redford was, you know, he'd made a film with Peter Yates, but Redford said, I will only do it
16:55if Sidney Pollock can direct it.
16:58Dino then paid off Peter Yates, his full fee, and Sidney Pollock came on board.
17:04So Sidney Pollock's a director, a fantastic director, but how did he get chosen to direct this?
17:10Well, if you'd looked at Pollock's previous films, he said he was unlikely espionage stars director.
17:17He tended to make what might call widescreen American romances.
17:21He loved big stories.
17:24He made The Way We Were.
17:26He made Jeremiah Johnson.
17:27He shifted around in milieu and genre, but he liked big stories and very romantic stories.
17:34And he loved stars and he loved performances.
17:37So the idea of a very tense clockwork thriller doesn't immediately fit.
17:41As far as Redford was concerned, he was the best director of Redford.
17:45He was the guy who understood him as an actor.
17:48So he brought Pollock on.
17:49And when Pollock came in, he said he was just sort of intrigued by the chance to do this kind
17:54of material.
17:55By the time that the project came along for Robert Redford, he was already a huge star.
18:00He had seen his success rise abruptly after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
18:05He'd been a TV actor before that and done a number of other roles.
18:08But it was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid that brought him to huge prominence.
18:12And he went from strength to strength in the 70s, largely with his director Sidney Pollock,
18:19who the two of them would have a long lasting collaboration.
18:22He was a huge star.
18:24He was a great romantic lead.
18:27And people loved him.
18:28I mean, you know, apart from the fact that he was, you know, excessively good looking,
18:31he was a good actor and he could do the stuff.
18:34So he was a huge star to take on this role, which is, you know, fairly a bit of a
18:42change for him.
18:43In fact, this was quite a challenge for him, although it appealed to his own sort of philosophy
18:49in his own, you know, democratic sensibilities, as it were.
18:54He, it made, he came across as a bit of a nerd.
18:58You know, he's a bit of a sort of bookish librarian type who happens to have a brain.
19:03But he, he's not particularly brave or action packed.
19:08He has to learn as he's going along, as he's escaping to somehow use his unconventionality to escape.
19:17And that shows his resourcefulness.
19:19Now, what happened was through a series of friends and political connections, mostly through Renford,
19:29we got to Helms.
19:32And Helms' attitude was very cavalier for some reason.
19:36He was not sensorial at all.
19:38He came into the trailer.
19:40He had a lot of bodyguards around.
19:43I mean, there were a lot of guys with walk-to-talkies and ear things.
19:48And, you know, I felt a little weird when he was in my trailer.
19:53I didn't know what to ask him.
19:55You know, I didn't want to insult him.
19:57But I, but I kind of implied it.
20:00I sort of set up a scene for him that he was going to watch.
20:03He had read the script.
20:05And I, I, I set up this sort of rogue operation idea for him.
20:10He just kind of grinned.
20:11Like I said, he, he just, he seemed very happy to be there.
20:14And loved listening to this whole intrigue.
20:19It all seemed fine.
20:21Every moment for me in this movie is something that we have at that time unconsciously in ourselves.
20:30It's almost like an affirmation of everything at the time that we, especially young people, thought was happening.
20:39So that in fact, it is a movie, but it also becomes a series of vignettes where you are, are
20:46literally sitting in the cinema going, wow.
20:50Uh, and you freeze it.
20:51You freeze it a little bit at the time.
20:54I'm not saying now, but at the time you froze the image, you froze the mailman coming into the guy
21:01coming in as the mailman.
21:02And then actually he's an assassin.
21:05You freeze that.
21:06And you think that that is the way it is.
21:09That that's the way America is.
21:11When, when Redford said, I, at the end, he says, I gave it to the New York times.
21:14And, and the CIA operative Cliff Robertson says, how do you know they're going to print it?
21:19Yeah.
21:19You think to yourself, that's what I feel.
21:21But while very much a film of its age, Three Days of the Condor varies markedly from its seventies contemporaries.
21:28It's more classical.
21:29In the vein of Hitchcock's wrong man thrillers, The 39 Steps and North by Northwest.
21:34It still has hints of the Bond style caper everyone involved had fooled themselves they were making.
21:41Pollock kept reiterating.
21:43He just set out to make a movie.
21:47Listen, please don't hurt me.
21:49Where do you live?
21:50Where do you live?
21:51Brooklyn Heights.
21:52Alone?
21:53I live with a friend.
21:56You live alone. Come on, let's go.
22:07Tantrex Industries.
22:08It's a cover.
22:09I work for the CIA.
22:11Oh, Jesus.
22:13Your assignment for today was to go out and kidnap a girl.
22:17Look it up.
22:18Look it up.
22:19Tantrex Industries.
22:23Then look up the number for the CIA in New York.
22:26You mean they're listed like my Aunt Gladys?
22:28Under U.S. government agencies.
22:29Go on.
22:34Is this what you do?
22:37This photography?
22:39Okay, I...
22:41It's the same number.
22:43Here is a powerful reminder that Robert Redford was so much more than just a pretty face.
22:48He was a cipher for a paranoid age.
22:51The American ideal battling corruption.
22:54Joe Turner was a radical departure for him.
22:57A cerebral character rather than a man of action.
22:59Indeed, because Joe Turner is no field agent, his moves are unpredictable.
23:05A desperate character, willing to test his own moral boundaries.
23:08Well, if you boil it down and say, right, this is an espionage thriller.
23:12It's very talky.
23:13It's very performance-driven.
23:15It's very stylish in the sense of the way it shoots people.
23:19There is action in it, but it's relatively minimal.
23:22It's very realistic.
23:23Plus, he brings a slightly contradictory, what I call a playful edge to it, an absurdity.
23:30He gives it this Dave Grusin jazz score.
23:32He sort of plays around with the idea that, is this real?
23:36You know, what's going through Redford's head is this sense of, can I believe this?
23:40You know, the world's become Alice in Wonderland.
23:42You know, I was going to my job and I come back and everyone's dead.
23:45You know, can this be real?
23:46And I think I love the idea that Pollock is testing our ability to believe in the material.
23:51There are certain moments in the film, such as when Joe Turner meets Cathy, that echo Hitchcock's
23:57Wrong Man thrillers like 39 Steps and North by Northwest.
23:59Do you think these are influences?
24:01Why does Pollock have those in there?
24:03So you could look at the storyline, a man on the run, an innocent man who becomes accused
24:08of killing and who takes, well, he kidnaps basically an innocent woman to help give him
24:13a safe haven and help clear his name.
24:15Basically, he has to find the source of the conspiracy to try and save himself.
24:20Now that's the plot of the 39 Steps.
24:22That's kind of partially the plot of the North by Northwest.
24:25So it's very Hitchcockian.
24:27It has that idea of the ordinary man thrust into the extraordinary.
24:30It's not fully Hitchcockian because we do have the CIA.
24:34Joe Turner is on one level an agent.
24:37But it still has that idea of there's something of an ordinary man about him confronting extraordinary forces.
24:42The character of Cathy was as much a departure for Faye Dunaway.
24:47She's an innocent kidnapped by the desperate Joe looking for a safe haven.
24:51A terrified but decent figure not knowing who she can trust.
24:55For Pollock, their relationship is the central metaphor for the film.
24:59A microcosm of America at large.
25:01If Dunaway brought any baggage from Bonnie and Clyde or Chinatown, well, so much the better.
25:07He runs away, he gets away, and then he kidnaps Faye Dunaway.
25:11Now, you know, freeze the frame there as well.
25:14This is Faye Dunaway.
25:16This is another movie star whose parts are very complex.
25:22There's Faye Dunaway in this car, and you think, well, what's going to happen here next?
25:28She, you have to think to yourself that she took the role because she believed in it, but also because
25:33she's an actor.
25:34She wanted to try something.
25:36So it's a very strange part for Faye Dunaway to take because she's sort of like a mousy kind of
25:44subjugate.
25:45That's what she's playing.
25:46And so we're watching the duel between these two.
25:50And we're also, and maybe this is Pollock's intention, maybe this is Redford's intention,
25:56is for us to ask what's going to happen next because this is Faye Dunaway.
26:00So something is going to happen.
26:02This isn't everything that we think it is, and of course it turns out to be true.
26:06It isn't what we think it is.
26:08Faye Dunaway is an interesting one for this kind of part because she is essentially an ordinary woman,
26:14a photographer living in the city, who is going about her daily business,
26:18getting ready to go on a ski trip with her boyfriend, who remains unseen in the film.
26:23And then Redford has a gun and snatches her up off the street as a kind of ruse and as
26:28a hostage
26:29in order to find some safety with a stranger.
26:32So she's in a hostage situation and she's extremely vulnerable.
26:36And Dunaway didn't usually play vulnerable that often.
26:39She played ice queens often, or she played women with a really kind of aloof exterior.
26:46Even in Bonnie and Clyde, her breakout role, she's maybe a little bit less aloof, but she's sort of opaque.
26:52You don't really understand what all of her motivation is.
26:55There's a kind of violence and frenzy about her.
26:57She's often unlikable.
26:59In this film, she's very sympathetic because she's completely taken by surprise by the situation
27:05and is spending most of it in terror and fear for her safety and for her life.
27:10What's also interesting about the role and this romantic subplot is that it does divide opinion, I think.
27:18I think some people do see it as being so implausible that you would, you know,
27:22almost get Stockholm Syndrome immediately and fall for somebody who's pointing a gun at you.
27:26It does probably stretch the realms of, you know, realism.
27:29But I don't really think realism is what the film is going for here.
27:32The film is going, this is Faye Dunaway and Robert Redford, and the star power of their combined chemistry.
27:39Bringing an aura of European class, Max von Sydow was Bergman's muse.
27:44The film's ostensible villain is so refreshing with his mix of aristocratic charm and pragmatism.
27:51The why is not important to Joubert, only the when and the how much.
27:55Such delicious detail.
27:57The unwavering eloquence, the impeccable houndstooth coat,
28:01his dedication to painting model soldiers.
28:05Von Sydow offers the tidy face of amorality, a man unburdened by ideals.
28:11It would happen this way.
28:14You may be walking.
28:17Maybe the first sunny day of the spring.
28:21And a car will slow beside you.
28:24And a door will open.
28:26And someone you know, maybe even trust, will get out of the car.
28:33And he will smile.
28:35A becoming smile.
28:39But he will leave open the door of the car.
28:43And offer to give you a lift.
28:52You seem to understand it all so well.
28:56The casting of the Swedish actor Max von Sydow is a stroke of genius.
29:01He, of course, grew up.
29:03We grew up with him in Ingmar Bergman films.
29:06But he quite swiftly made the transition to Hollywood and, in fact, other parts of the world.
29:13It was a relief for him to take this role.
29:16In spite of the fact that he's a sort of putative villain.
29:20Because he had much greater depth as Joubert, the lead assassin.
29:26Max von Sydow is a great actor.
29:28He's a great international actor.
29:30He played Christ, Jesus Christ, even, in a movie a couple of years earlier.
29:38He's, of course, in the great Ingmar Bergman cinema.
29:43The star of it.
29:45A great actor in terms of, if you know anything about the cinema, you know about Max von Sydow.
29:52He's always the good guy, though.
29:53He's always good.
29:54He's always got radiance around him.
29:58And so he enters the picture.
30:02And there's so much paranoia in this movie.
30:05So much paranoia in America.
30:07This guy comes in.
30:09He's got a European accent.
30:11He's very, and I'm thinking about the general audience, who would maybe not know von Sydow.
30:16Maybe just from the biblical picture, King of Kings, that he made.
30:19So you think, uh-oh.
30:22Uh-oh.
30:23What is this?
30:25And he comes in.
30:26He's very cool.
30:27He's very calm.
30:28He tells Robert Redford's character exactly the way things are going to be.
30:32And only a European could do that at that point in the history of the American cinema.
30:40Only somebody from the outside could actually do that.
30:43The conniving schemes of the CIA are embodied in a set of aging men in suits,
30:48sitting behind desks as if playing a game of chess.
30:51Cold-hearted representatives of the hidden America.
30:54Cliff Robertson is the by any means necessary real politic philosophy.
30:59The great John Houseman is the old school realist.
31:02And Addison Powell is the supervisor who pursues American interests whatever the cost.
31:07Then there are some great supporting performances from major actors.
31:11Cliff Robertson as this apparently trustworthy CIA man who is in fact on the take.
31:18And is, you know, completely able to rationalize his attitude towards the, you know,
31:25he believes it's patriotism and for the greater good.
31:27So these are all really believable characters.
31:30And Pollock felt it was really important to give even kind of the mustache twirling villain a point of view.
31:36How would you describe Joe's CIA bosses and their approach to him?
31:43The kind of people they are?
31:45In a sense, how the CIA are depicted is crucial to understanding Three Days of the Condor and the America
31:52it portrays.
31:53So what Joe comes to realize very quickly is that he can't trust his bosses.
31:58So the first thing he tries to do is call, you know, bring me in.
32:01There's been an assassination.
32:02Yeah, things get complicated and knotty pretty quickly.
32:05You know, they're saying, well, bring someone to get you.
32:07The person who tries to get him tries to kill him.
32:10So Joe thinks this is closer to home than I expected.
32:13This isn't some kind of foreign insurgents.
32:15This is my own bosses.
32:17So that is the shockwave.
32:19That is the Watergate-esque shockwave that runs then through the film.
32:23But the beauty of the film and the beauty of the writing is how the CIA are then depicted.
32:28And they're depicted as a kind of set of elders, these men behind desks.
32:33They aren't sort of gothic villains in any sort of old-fashioned sense.
32:38They are suits.
32:40And you get Cliff Robertson as Mr. Higgins, who essentially isn't actually a villain.
32:45You know, he doesn't, you know, there's a corrupt part of the CIA that he doesn't even know about.
32:49But he certainly can't be trusted.
32:50He's just trying to do his job.
32:52There's this lovely sense of what's happened to the CIA is an embarrassment.
32:57They kind of want to clean up the embarrassment.
32:59That's how they treat living people.
33:01We've just got to cover up what's happened.
33:03It's not good for the CIA.
33:05So there's all these scenes between Cliff Robertson and his boss, Mr. Waybash.
33:10He's played by the great John Houseman.
33:12He once worked with Orson Welles, you know, Mercury Theatre.
33:15He has a sort of American tradition, another lovely piece of Pollock casting.
33:19And what he brings is this sense of old-school CIA.
33:24He has a very lovely speech which talks about, I was with the OSS during World War II.
33:30I worked with William Donovan, who's a real figure in the American Secret Service.
33:34And he says this beautiful line.
33:37He says, I miss the clarity.
33:39And what he says is that the world no longer has good or bad in it.
33:43It's all about methods.
33:44It's all about calculation.
33:46It's all about by any means necessary.
33:49Through Pollock's tight editing, lingering close-ups, and sullen shadows, Joe is trapped in an almost Kafkaesque nightmare, where he
33:57can no longer trust anyone.
33:59It is perhaps wrong to call this a paranoid thriller.
34:02They really are out to get him.
34:04The film is fueled by Joe's stress.
34:07There is something of John le Carre cynicism here, too.
34:11The idea that espionage is ultimately just a game.
34:14I personally have never, ever felt, when I was working on a film, that it was going to become a
34:21special film of any kind.
34:22You just, you hope it's not an embarrassment.
34:27I mean, you don't, you're not, you don't, your sights are always high.
34:31I don't mean that you don't hope in some way that you, you know, you hope you'll, everything is a
34:36great everything, you know.
34:37I mean, you, you daydream always about making something that'll last and that'll be wonderful, but, but the realities of
34:45filmmaking, uh, leaven that feeling if you, if you have any degree of sanity.
34:53I mean, you can get carried away and, and imagine that you're some sort of a genius or something, but
34:58that just doesn't happen.
34:59As a rule, you, the problems to solve on a day to day and moment by moment basis are what
35:06you're trying to do.
35:07And you're always, I'm always surprised when, you know, when it works, uh, you get it together and it works.
35:15And then every once in a while, it really becomes a film that, that, that sticks around for a while.
35:20I don't think there's any way you can predict that.
35:23And I think if you polled, uh, directors, they would, I, I think they would agree with me that while
35:30you're working on a film, you don't.
35:32I've never talked to a director who said, you know, I knew the first day I went to work that
35:35this was going to be a great film.
35:37You're just too, too, uh, concerned with the problem.
35:41Pollock expertly frames his characters against the bustling heedless streets of New York in the lead up to Christmas.
35:47Shooting on location, Manhattan has never been more claustrophobic, as if the alleyways and bridges were closing in on Joe.
35:55This made for a fraught shoot.
35:58But Pollock knew that there were textures and details you could get nowhere else.
36:21Significantly, this is a film about technology.
36:24The spy genre was moving with the times.
36:26The intricacies of wire tapping, text scanning, computers the size of fridge freezers and great 70s phone acting reveal the
36:34film's prophetic power.
36:37Pollock was flabbergasted to find his film growing in relevance, as post-Watergate reports leaked, revealing the extent of the
36:44CIA's dirty tricks.
36:46There's no doubt about it that this film is also about technology and how it is used in covert ways,
36:53especially in the spy game.
36:56In fact, it's it's it's from the very opening sort of credit sequence as Joe is cycling through the traffic.
37:03The actual words on the screen are a sort of computerized script.
37:08So you think, OK, fine.
37:11So you've got immediately assigned that technology is going to play a big role in this.
37:16You could say that the film is about the rise of technology and and in espionage, although as a time
37:22that wouldn't have been apparent.
37:24But if you look back on it now, Redford's character is kind, he's a literary man, but he's also grounded
37:33in machines.
37:33He understands them.
37:35And we are beginning to understand them at this point in the arc of history about how much they are
37:42shaping our destiny, how much they are in command and control of things.
37:48And the movie shows maybe the the bifurcation between this literary man book, a book and a machine.
37:59And suddenly this just comes to me.
38:02You begin to see the machine aspect take over this movie.
38:07Of course, a police state uses technology to keep a firm eye on its citizens.
38:12In this film, do you think that there's a use of technology that involves that?
38:17And also, how does Joe Turner's ability with technology allow him to turn the tables at certain points?
38:24Yeah, I think this is something very important about what Three Days of the Condor does is it introduces almost
38:31a new form of thriller.
38:33The techno thriller, which became more and more important and prominent.
38:37What was being analyzed here, if you want, is the point of inflection in American espionage when the old techniques,
38:45the old spying, was moving into a technological age where data and computers and text analysis were becoming the medium
38:55by which people were sought.
38:57There's a great deal of kind of business given over to tracking Joe down using phone lines and maps.
39:03And you think you can imagine this film being set in the 2020s and and sort of digital technology being
39:10used.
39:10This is the beginning of the kind of the idea of paranoia moving into a different medium.
39:16The brief bursts of violence are shockingly quick and bloody.
39:21Redford makes hair-raising escapes and sets his own ingenious traps.
39:25It is all intensely realistic.
39:27In an ironic touch, Joe and his fellow researchers examine spy novels for signs of real conspiracy.
39:34It's funny to see Redford in a role as somebody who's kind of bookish because although he was a very
39:42intelligent person in life, he often physically favored the jock or the cowboy or the romantic lead.
39:48But he was increasingly, throughout his career, drawn to and interested in more heady and liberal roles.
39:55And we see that following it up with All the President's Men, another wonderful thriller that was contemporary to its
40:01time.
40:02So here he does quite a good job of, in as much as you can believe that he's a nerd,
40:08looking like he does, you believe that this is somebody who has chosen the life of the mind.
40:14And that's his primary interest.
40:17And he does it with a little bit of cockiness because in that way that somebody who's very, very clever
40:22has sometimes a bit of pomposity about them.
40:24We see that at the beginning and then we see it just completely crumble in the face of the violence
40:30and shock and confusion of what happens.
40:33A lot of people who are contemporary viewers or who visited the film for the first time have also commented
40:38on what a fashion inspiration Redford is in the movie.
40:42He's got these great gold aviator specs and the turned up black wool pea coat to the point that people
40:48are saying that the film is actually just about a man who dresses so fly that the CIA want him
40:53dead.
40:53Three Days of the Condor concludes on a chilling note.
40:58Robert St Higgins delivers his cold-hearted speech to Joe and to the audience.
41:03This is the way this civilization works. Get used to it.
41:08As the Salvation Army sings in the background, Joe slips away into the streets.
41:13He may never come in from the cold.
41:15This is deeply, deeply cynical, of course, because it involves, you know, the loss of life, human life.
41:22It involves war. It involves coups in certain places.
41:26The CIA have obviously been targeted from time to time.
41:30You know, the spotlight is always put on them and there's the villains and everything like this.
41:34But this is, you know, this is international, you know.
41:36This goes on all the time, these covert operations.
41:41There are two levels, or at least two levels, below the official organization.
41:46In Joe's words, he said, you mean there's a CIA inside the CIA?
41:52And it has to be admitted, you know, Higgins, the wonderful Cliff Robertson and his amazingly sort of weird toupee.
41:59Another cover up, if you like, says, yeah, he says it's a game.
42:05One of the biggest box office draws of 1975 is still remarkable how prescient Three Days of the Condor turned
42:11out to be.
42:12This is both fantasy and historical document.
42:15Or maybe reality was becoming more like a Hollywood thriller.
42:19The central secret involves the CIA's attempts to destabilize foreign regimes for their oil.
42:25Technology was being put to dubious use.
42:27And eerily, the CIA office was located in the World Trade Center.
42:33We were already positioned as an audience to be ready for this film.
42:39This film said things that we were saying to ourselves and to our friends.
42:43It was being said out loud.
42:45This film without the mask and the cloak of a period piece like The Godfather or, you know,
42:52a sci-fi thing like Star Wars.
42:54This film put us in the present and asked the questions directly.
43:01Not with metaphor.
43:03Not with anything that the other movies, great movies did.
43:07This asked the question directly.
43:09And it asked the question through an all-American actor who had the courage to actually be on screen and
43:17ask the questions.
43:18So you couldn't run away from Robert Redford.
43:21You couldn't pigeonhole him as an Italian, New York Italian, like you could Robert De Niro.
43:27Or you had, he was, he was American in his apple pie.
43:30And he asked the questions.
43:31And that is the power of the movie.
43:35And that is a credit to him as an actor and as a human being.
43:41So in a sense, I think the movie will grow as the country matures and understands itself.
43:48I mean, you can also say what an influential film Three Days of the Condor has become.
43:52Here are the seeds of the Bourne films.
43:55Here is that idea of your central character is a James Bond figure, but desperate and human.
44:02It's just the humanizing of the Bond idea.
44:04I think even late Bond films probably draw back on Three Days of the Condor to try and develop their
44:10character into a way that makes it just much more interesting.
44:14If we relate, you know, then we get scared.
44:18And I think that's the key.
44:19And what Pollock does and what Redford do is they make you relate and understand this landscape.
44:25And that's a brilliant thing for a movie to be doing.
44:28Three Days of the Condor is hugely influential.
44:31Redford became a figurehead of the era.
44:33When not on set, he was busy preparing for his next role.
44:37That of Bob Woodward in All the President's Men.
44:40Dunaway would go on to network.
44:43Pollock would revisit similar themes in The Firm and The Interpreter.
44:47Filled with distrust, suspicion and institutional corruption, this remarkable thriller grows more relevant by the year.
44:56Hey, Turner.
45:00How do you know they'll print it?
45:04You can take a walk.
45:06But how far if they don't print it?
45:10They'll print it.
45:12How do you know?
45:13You can take a walk.
45:17How to put it in the air?
45:20You can take a walk.
45:22You can take a walk.
45:23And you can take a walk.
45:26I'm Julienneco Notty!
45:27I'm Julienneco Notty!
45:57Transcription by CastingWords
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