25/09/2025
Published in
The Conversation
Pablo Castrillo Maortua
Professor of Culture and Audiovisual Communication department
The movie Three Days of the Condorwhich turns 50, was one of seven collaborations between director Sydney Pollack and the recently deceased Robert Redford. This film transposed the Hitchcockian trope of the innocent framed -Sabotage (1942), Death at the Heels (1959)-to a new ethos: that of the troubled, liberal seventies.
Its protagonist, the nerdy and gawky Joe Turner (of course, anyone would want to be gawky with those blond locks and that blue-glass gaze), forged a new subject of the contemporary hero: the intellectual or analyst turned agent that we would later see in the countless adaptations of Jack Ryan (Tom Clancy's novels), The Pelican report (1993), Conspiracy (1997) or the more recent and highly praiseworthy Amateur (2025).
An unlikely hero
Already half a century ago, Condor was peering into the abyss of technological anxiety. Its first sequence is recreated in a set of devices dedicated to scanning and gathering information, whose electromechanical hum will later muffle the gunfire of the hired assassins who assault the CIA's clandestine office.
Turner is saved precisely because he is a geek: he is the subject who parks his moped at the exact angle where the security camera allows him to keep an eye on it, the one who solves puzzles that baffle the entire office (of intelligence analysts) and the class of person who knows exactly when it is going to rain. That's why he goes out to pick up the food through the back door - "he saves an apple", explains the administrative assistant to the frustrated security guard - and thus avoids ending up riddled with bullets.
From that moment on, this chubby, book-eating protagonist must climb the steep slope of heroism, until he unmasks and defies the most secret and fearsome power Structures of the State. Turner thus acquires the condition of the citizen turned into a moving target, for whom the threat is everywhere: "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're not being chased".
To trust or not to trust
Precisely, one of the existential problems explored in the film is whether, in a world governed by "the business of suspicion," there is still the possibility of trust. At the beginning, Turner protests against the confidentiality requirements of his work, because "I happen to trust some people." But near the end, when he has barely saved his life by a fortunate confluence of interests, the professional hitman Joubert (Max von Sydow) offers him an omen:
"It will happen like this. You may be walking. Maybe the first sunny day of spring. A car will pull up beside you, and a door will open, and someone you know, maybe even trust, will get out of the car. And he will smile, a smile that will make you feel good. But he will leave the car door open and offer to give you a ride."
The prophecy is not literally fulfilled, but almost.
Casualty policy
However, the political commentary in The Three Days of the Condor was circumstantial and even incidental.
On the one hand, the film's reception was shrouded in some controversy, because it coincided in time with the "Family Jewels" scandal, a series of internal CIA documents revealing illegal surveillance operations over the years. Some of them - the whole set would not be declassified until 2007 -made the front page of The New York Times in December 1974, while the film was still in production.
Pollack tried to defuse accusations of anti-establishment propaganda: "the intention was to make [a film] faithful to the thriller genre and, in that framework, to explore some ideas about suspicion, trust, even morality". It was something of a preemptive parable, taking the CIA "as a metaphor" and drawing "conclusions from post-Watergate America."
Moreover, the film was unwittingly framed in the traumatized imaginary of the 21st century through its authentic visual devotion to the Twin Towers, opened just two years earlier. That the film placed the CIA's New York offices in the complex may have been pure fiction, but its post-2001 re-reading is stinging, if not bitterly ironic. Moreover, it turned out that the Agency did have a secret office in the World Trade Center, but in Building No. 7 and not in one of the Towers, as the film implies.
All men... against the CIA
The Watergate Case is a core topic of essential reading for The Three Days of the Condor and, probably, for much of Redford's degree program
In that scandal of the Nixon Administration, it was shown that former CIA operatives provided illegal services to the White House. This was exemplarily documented by The Washington Post and dramatized -also exemplarily- in the following way All the President's Menagain with Robert Redford, hand in hand with another icon of the seventies, Dustin Hoffman. This journalistic thriller by Alan J. Pakula arrived in theaters only seven months after Condor, in April '76.
The concurrence of its leading star and an equally shadowy portrait of the CIA must have made a concerted reading of the two films inevitable. And that dialogue is nowhere better expressed than in their respective final shots.
In Condor, Turner has entrusted the account of the crimes committed by the Agency to The New York Times, but the villainous CIA agent seems to imply that its tentacles also extend into the essay: "How do you know they'll publish it?" After making a confession of faith - "They'll publish it" - Pollack freezes the frame of Redford getting lost amid the Manhattan Christmas bustle. While the question still echoes in our minds, Turner has no choice but to lose himself in anonymity in the hope that the hitman's prophecy will not come true.
On the other hand, the final shot of All the President's Men goes in the opposite direction: journalists Woodward and Berstein -Redford and Hoffman- type with the discipline of soldiers in the background of the half-empty essay of the Washington Post. Meanwhile, in the foreground, television takes over the news coverage of Nixon's presidential inauguration, oblivious to the effect that the work of the two reporters will soon have: confessions, court sentences... and the resignation of the president.
A half-century classic
It is difficult to gauge the impact of The Three Days of the Condor on the history not only of suspense or even of cinema, but of popular culture as a whole.
After the successful cycle of conspiracy thrillers of the seventies, the techno-paranoid Public Enemy (Tony Scott, 1998) became sadly prophetic of what was to come after 9/11. Sydney Pollack himself saw fit to update himself in this new context of terror and trauma. The Interpreter (2005), equally paranoid and set in the streets of Manhattan, altered the plot of the incriminated innocent, framing the accidental finding of an assassination in the notion of revenge, and thus allegorizing the mood of a nation still badly wounded and limping.
Shortly thereafter, the television series Rubicon (2010) and, more obviously, Condor (2018-2020) took the archetype of the rebel analyst and government conspiracy to update their motives and technological context, amplified by orders of magnitude.
But perhaps the most lasting impact was that of Robert Redford himself, who not only played Bob Woodward, but persisted in politically engaged filmmaking, especially in his later decades, directing films like Lions for Lambs (2007), The Conspiracy (2010) y Pact of Silence (2012), titles that more literally or allegorically scrutinized the heart of the U.S. in light of its political history.
Now, in the midst of self-serving feuds between the White House and the media, we have bid farewell to Robert Redford. The Three Days of the Condor and his political filmography are only a small part of his colossal contribution to film history, which he shaped along with a whole generation of stars - Paul Newman, Jane Fonda, Sidney Poitier, Warren Beatty - who were not only inimitably charismatic but politically aware, and who engaged in stories that reflected or questioned the spirit of their times, proving that Hollywood cinema could be at once popular, respectful and challenging to audiences.