Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, Max von Sydow
I caught this classic of '70s angst for the first time in 2010. Hearing the title, I would mix it up in my mind with similarly titled flicks, including Night of the Iguana, a Tennessee Williams drama with Richard Burton and Ava Gardner; Day of the Jackal, a thriller about Fench military hero and prime minister Charles de Gaulle that I’ve never seen; and Day of the Locust, an insane flick about 1930s Hollywood that still haunts me.
Director Sydney Pollack's political thriller is about an everyman caught in a nightmarish and hard-to-follow government plot that is scarily prescient. Robert Redford is Joe Turner -- can you get a more Everyman name than that? -- a CIA reader/researcher who is a little too good at his gig. When he discovers what he shouldn't, the running begins in earnest. Using a grainy color film stock that looks almost like newsreel, Pollack paints a portrait of sheer paranoia that fits perfectly with the Vietnam era of covert government operations and suppressed public information.
PLOT SUMMARY:
At a small CIA outpost inside a fashionable upper East Side Manhattan townhouse, Joe Turner works with a close-knit team. He's great at what he does. No sooner has he called his superiors in Washington to report evidence of a covert CIA operation set to invade the Middle East than a crew of government assassins is dispatched to hush it up. As fate and the gods of storytelling would have it, Joe slips out the back to fetch lunch and returns to find everyone in the office murdered, including his co-worker girlfriend.
Marked for death, Joe – code name Condor -- contacts his New York home office via pay phone for help and comes up with one Higgins (Cliff Robertson with an outsized 70s comb-over), a CIA deputy chief whom he’s never met. Higgins says he'll help and tells Joe to meet agents in an alley at the back of the Ansonia Hotel on 72nd Street. When Joe balks, Higgins tells him to bring a friend. Unsurprisingly, when Joe and his bestie arrive in the alley, a shootout ensues that leaves the friend and the two agents sent to meet them dead. Desperate to elude the killers as well as the police, who are converging on the crime scene, Joe stumbles into a clothing store and kidnaps a customer, Kathy Hale (played by an atypically vulnerable-looking Faye Dunaway) and has her drive him to her apartment in Brooklyn. She is justifiably terrified, doesn’t believe his tale, and struggles to get free of him.
Joe is not an agent, but a reader. He must rely on his wits and everything he has ever read about political intrigue, spying, hit men, even gun play to unravel the mystery of what has happened. Realizing that another friend is in imminent danger, he ties Kathy to the toilet and drives her car to the friend’s highrise apartment, convincing his wife to leave immediately. On the way out he unknowingly crosses paths with killing machine-for-hire Joubert, played by Max von Sydow. The two share a long and suspenseful elevator ride to the lobby in which Joe realizes who the guy is. He allows Joubert to leave the building, but knowing that he could be killed the minute he walks out the door, Joe engages a group of black people in the lobby to walk him to his car, promising them $5 apiece. Joe escapes, and Joubert, hiding in some bushes with Joe in his sights, must accede defeat for the moment. But not before noting the license plate of the car.
Joe returns to Kathy’s apartment and ungags her, and here’s where things get even more complicated. Her live-in boyfriend, who has gone to Vermont to ski and is expecting her to join him, calls up but Joe threatens her not to let on she's in trouble. She blows the man off with a tale of a car breakdown, and actually sounds none too sorry about it. Meanwhile, Joe is checking out her place, studying the black n white photos of spare, haunting autumnscapes she has posted and surmises that she is a lonely woman with secrets. Joe is no criminal, but he is hella observant. He tells Kathy that he needs time to figure things out, but he also needs at least one night to forget before he'll go away and leave her be. “You like men who go away,” he tells her, adding, “Why haven’t you asked me to untie your hands yet?” The handsome stranger has just looked deep into her hidden truth. And after all, it's Robert freakin' Redford. So of course she lays back and lets it happen. Cue the jazzy Fender Rhodes Dave Grusin score as Joe and Kathy get busy.
Their idyll is interrupted the next morning when a postman knocking with a package turns out to be one of the uniformed hitmen who helped take out all Joe's co-workers. The scene erupts into a full on fight with furniture flying and a struggle for the gun. Joe ends up shooting the assailant as Kathy screams. Joe calms her and the two leave the apartment. Love on the run.
This is the point at which the Hunted becomes the Hunter. Putting two and two together, Joe decides to turn the tables and now tracks the CIA chief who's rubber-stamping all the mayhem, while being dogged at every step by Joubert. The path leads to the home of an agency official in suburban Washington, D.C., where Joubert breaks in, grabs the gun and surprisingly offs the man Joe’s been trying to squeeze. Seems the hitman switched sides for a bigger paycheck. Joubert explains that he takes no sides, he’s just the hired help. No hard feelings. He lets Joe go.
Back in NYC, Joe uses Kathy as bait to locate and identify Higgins, whom they kidnap from a lower Manhattan lunch spot so he can get answers. Check the irony in this prescient exchange, when Joe asks, Would the US really secretly invade the Middle East over oil? Higgins says Yes. Joe thinks that the American people should be given the choice to vote on it, that government operations should be transparent. Says Higgins: “Today it’s oil, but what if it’s water, or food? When people run out, they won’t want to be asked, they’ll just want us to GET it for them.” Righteous Joe tells Higgins that he has leaked the information about the secret "CIA within the CIA" to the New York Times, as they stand in front of the paper's headquarters.
“You have no idea how much damage you’ve just done,” says Higgins.
“I hope so,” says Turner, who then melts into the crowd.
NOTES:
You know I love my New York, especially Dirty Old 1970s New York. In this film Times Square is still the delightfully sleazy neon cesspool it used to be, the buses are still forest green with sliver panels, Broadway looks like Broadway, the old apartment buildings still have the same old chain fences and cheesy lobbies, the Ansonia Hotel is in all its architectural glory on 72nd Street, and the World Trade Center towers still stand tall. That was the New York I grew up in, went to school in, spent my early career in.
Director Sidney Pollack makes a few nods to the city's diversity, with one of Turner’s murdered CIA co-workers was a lovely Asian woman. And of course there is the crowd of African Americans in the lobby, though when you get right down to it, Joe uses these innocent black folk as human shields. I was convinced that any of them would be gunned down in the scene, much as we've been conditioned to see the token black character be the first to catch a bullet in most mainstream flicks. This doesn’t happen, I was relieved to note, but neither does Joe Turner cough up the $5 he’d promised to dole out, to the crowd’s jeering disappointment. Also, several of the sisters and brothers are wielding tambourines, because of course any gathering of colored people in New York City would naturally include percussion instruments.
On first viewing I’m intrigued by the Redford-Dunaway relationship. I'm not a complete prude, but it always astounds me how quickly strangers fall into bed together in movies, particularly in the films of the ‘70s. Dunaway plays a truly complicated woman where still waters run deep, and when she finally believes him it’s a beautiful moment. She confesses, “You’re a really sweet man to be with.”
My favorite character is the nonpartisan Joubert, whose European coolness as the hitman (smarty-pants Joe IDs his accent as being from Alsace-Lorraine in France) actually makes him the most interesting person in the flick. Actor Von Sydow has one scene in a hotel room, passing the time between hits by painting a miniature soldier. He's a killer, but he has an inner life. It's a detail coopted by director John Frankenheimer in his ‘90s thriller Ronin, where the Jean Reno character's safe house contact lives in Alsace Lorraine and paints miniature ronin figures before removing a bullet from American operative Bob DeNiro.
Three Days of the Condor is a classic of the genre, where the Everyman knowingly or unknowingly comes in possession of The Thing That Will Change the World, and must run from those who violently want it stopped or violently want to take it for themselves.
FAVORITE LINE
Turner: Have I raped you yet? Have I even tried?
Hale: The night is young.
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