Three Days of the Condor (Second Review)

One of my favorite thrillers. It is taken from a book by James Grady, Six Days of the Condor. Cutting the time in half works well for a movie. Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway have good chemistry together. My one caveat is that Redford is really too pretty to play a bookworm working for a small CIA operation. Dustin Hoffman might have been an easier sell in that part. But I quickly got used to it. All six people in the place where he works are assassinated, and he escapes purely by blind luck. He is not a field agent, has no training for things like that, but he has read a ton of spy novels and understands, in theory, some of the basic things one must do when people are out to kill you. And gradually he uncovers the dirtiness behind the murders. I don’t think the answers will surprise you, but the pleasure is in him learning to live the life of a spy. There is one of the best fight scenes ever, one that doesn’t stretch your credulity too much. How long has it been since you’ve seen one like that?

All the tech stuff we see here was state-of-the-art at the time, but looks very horse-and-buggy these days. There has been so incredibly much progress in the short span of my life, though not as much as my grandparents’, who were born just before the Wright Brothers and lived to see men on the moon. All the production design was by my friend Gene Rudolf, who designed everything you see in my movie, Millennium. I always thought he did a damn good job.