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Three Days of the Condor


Three Days of the Condor

Rated:None
Director:Sydney Pollack
Cast:Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, Max Von Sydow, John Houseman
Release Date:2005
Genre:Action, Drama, Suspense

At Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions’ Mountcastle Auditorium Feb. 24 at 7:15 p.m.

By Blake de Pastino | Posted 2/23/2005

Robert Redford has never matched in acting chops what he had in winsome charm, but he does deserve credit for investing himself so wholly in the paranoiac cinema of the 1970s. Between Watergate and 1980, Redford starred exclusively in films about good men who take on corrupt conspiracies (All the President’s Men, The Electric Horseman, Brubaker), and in its politics, at least, 1975’s Three Days of the Condor seems as relevant today as ever. Redford fails to elicit a single credible emotion as Joe Turner, a CIA researcher who goes on the lam after his entire office is assassinated, but that’s not the point. The point is that everyone he meets is in on something, and it’s not clear what, from the freelance hit man he’s running from (Max Von Sydow, fantastically menacing) to the CIA boss trying to bring him in from the cold (Cliff Robertson, afraid to muss his hair), though probably not the girl he kidnaps for cover (Faye Dunaway, the only actor who really showed up). Director Sydney Pollack applies his poor man’s vérité to good effect, allowing Redford’s paranoia to feel palpable, even today, and when you get to the Maguffin at the end when all the plots unravel, you’ll swear 1975 was 2005.

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