Blu-ray Review: 3 Days of the Condor (1975)

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A.K.A. Three Days of the Condor

After hitting the street on 5/19, three new paranoid thriller Blu-ray releases from Paramount Home Entertainment have definitely found this reviewer looking over her shoulder over the course of a week and a half.

Gripping and diverse, the titles have arrived in tandem with the angry, morally thought-provoking twenty-first century Falling Down inspired Changing Lanes and the underrated war film Enemy at the Gates. And to top off that slate of movies, Warner Brothers managed to tie right into the theme with a Deluxe Edition DVD and Blu-ray of Falling Down hitting shelves this week as well.

However, for the most part it's been an in-depth, two week long look at cinematic onscreen paranoia lately at Film Intuition via three very different Hitchcockian influenced works. Juggling unreliable narrators with unbelievable situations and undeniable tension, we've explored 'em all in the form of Sydney Pollack's fresh-after-Watergate classic 3 Days of the Condor, John Woo's North By Northwest inspired action laced update of a Philip K. Dick story in Paycheck, and a haunting turn by Christian Bale as an emaciated insomniac in Brad Anderson's cult favorite The Machinist.

Although before we settle into the rest, we'll go back in time to the cold war era for 3 Days of the Condor which-- going completely against the grain-- opted not to use Russia as a backdrop but instead set the action right here in the United States.

While some people say that they're saving up for a rainy day, it's precisely a rainy day that ends up saving Robert Redford from getting massacred along with the rest of his coworkers in a lunchtime raid at their office after only a few minutes into The Way We Were and Jeremiah Johnson director Sydney Pollack's fast-moving thriller.

Working as a reader in the purposely dully named American Literary Historical Society-- Redford's Joseph Turner breaks protocol at what is in reality a governmental agency "front" by sneaking out the back to cut a few rain soaked blocks off his trip to bring back lunch. Missing from the raid that's foreshadowed in an eerie sequence as we watch our villain flip through photographs of the workers (including Redford's which conspicuously looks like a dreamy headshot), Turner we soon ascertain is both the last and only man from his tiny group left standing once the bullets fly.

So in a cross between saving his life for a rainy day and/or being literally "out to lunch" in the type of odd coincidence his character would've looked for by scouring texts of all types as a "code-breaker" of sorts-- reading everything he can for patterns or dangerous information-- suddenly the nerdy Dick Tracy loving avid comic book enthusiast Joseph Turner realizes he needs to abandon the librarian pretense and go into spy mode.



The only thing is, the admittedly clumsy and awkward Turner has never really gone into spy mode before and now, armed only with a tiny pistol he secured from the desk of the receptionist, Joseph Turner is easily outnumbered and outgunned. Obviously, we assume (as does Turner) that the government must have all kinds of "contingency plans" that will fall into place and he dutifully phones in, revealing his code name of Condor.

However, and much to the late great Sydney Pollack's credit in not revealing the link to the CIA by name until almost thirty minutes into the movie, the tension and uncertainty mounts as Turner grows increasingly suspicious. And when additional gunplay ensues, he realizes he has no idea where to turn since as the movie's dynamite tagline promises, "in the next seventy-two hours almost everyone he trusts will try to kill him."

Logically, he decides the next best move would be to steer clear of old surroundings and associates so he randomly abducts the next woman with whom he comes into contact-- Faye Dunaway's game Kathy Hale-- and the two hide out at her apartment to sort things out.



Obviously since he's the man wielding the gun, Kathy tries to play along but Turner-- relieved to have someone to speak with earnestly confesses everything in an attempt to persuade her that he is who he says he is and not a cold-blooded criminal.

Fortunately Dunaway's character is penned as anything but a damsel in distress and, right in line with her string of memorable work of this era in films including Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, and Network-- she manages to get more mileage than we'd expect out of her role as unwitting and underwritten romantic sidekick and lonely girl photographer.

Although, of course the two do end up predictably becoming romantically involved (it's Dunaway and Redford in 1975-- what are they not going to hook up onscreen?!), the immediacy in which the two hit the sack that very night still feels like an intensely false note amidst the otherwise rhythmic pacing of arty and uncharacteristically roughly five-second long "shots" between cuts and the intelligent screenplay.

In fact, the dubious nature of their coupling was one of the plot points debated in the second sexiest scene (the first being the intercut hotel bar and room sequence) in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight in which Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney-- finding themselves in a similar situation-- chat about old movies while he holds her hostage in the trunk of a car.

Yet, most likely the reason for this largely unsuccessful leap to try and make us suspend our disbelief is one that-- similar to some of the clunky plot points of Turner's less-than-bright decisions and his near instantaneous transformation from a klutz to well, Dick Tracy-- can easily be attributed to the fact that Pollack's Condor was an adaptation of a novel set over the course of six instead of three days.

By speeding up the action to fit the running time and doing away with the exposition to make the film more of an action movie with a clearer through-line that will fall just under one hundred and twenty minutes, the film gets away with a lot of things that on the whole it probably wouldn't have by presenting them to us so quickly.

Despite some of the confusion and the sort of vague idea of a CIA within a CIA (which as Ebert noted, following Watergate was entirely plausible and it's indeed one that remains so in our Bourne Identity era) all tangled up in a paranoid plot that at times feels like a Hitchcockian MacGuffin that we can't quite understand until the film's final segment-- it works best as a cat and mouse thriller as Redford fights to stay alive.

With an incredible turn by Max von Sydow as one of the many dangerous "company" types and/or hired guns out to get Turner, Condor is filled with more than few scenes sure to get your heart rate going that are elevated by a great antihero '70s air about the film that fills it with just the right amount of doom lurking ahead long after the credits roll.

Thus, it's easy to just go ahead and forget some of the warning bells sounding in your brain like the ludicrous decision the main characters make to drive the same vehicle throughout even though the government knows it well and just join the chase in another excellent and exciting effort by frequent collaborators Pollack and Redford. Additionally, it's one that reminds you that it's always a good idea to go for a walk in the rain... just make sure you bring an umbrella and always remember your code name.

Autumn Hearts -- A New Beginning

Originally published at Blogcritics in my Under the Radar Series

Since the dawn of DVD and the all important demand that a movie earn far more bang for its box office buck when those cute little book-like boxes hit the shelves as opposed to the overpriced multiplexes, there’s been a strange practice that affects mostly indie, foreign, and art offerings that typically don’t earn a major release save for a few precious film festival screenings. And that is precisely the practice of saddling a perfectly good film with a name change to something the marketing team hopes will be catchier or friendlier to passersby (or more accurately their wallets) strolling through Best Buy or Blockbuster.

In doing so, sometimes they go from a pretentious sounding title like Life/Drawing to Apartment 12 for a festival award-winning Mark Ruffalo romantic comedy from years past or name one film Leon in Europe and the same movie The Professional in America in the mid-'90s to attract our gangster-loving culture. However, in the unique case of director Paolo Barzman’s beautiful, tender, and heartbreaking 2007 film starring Susan Sarandon, Christopher Plummer, Max von Sydow, and Gabriel Byrne, neither the original title nor the DVD title will manage to benefit it in the least.

The film which screened as the closing night film at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival was first dubbed Emotional Arithmetic — a title taken directly from Canadian author Matt Cohen’s novel upon which it is based. And more recently, it was released as Autumn Hearts: A New Beginning. Therefore, sadly Barzman’s quality film went from a nonsensical and ultimately pretentious name to an overly simplistic one that at best conjures up warm, fuzzy images of Hallmark Hall of Fame films and at worst is one so innocuous that you’ll struggle to recall it as soon as you hit eject.

Adding to the confusion is that the film’s official website still uses the old name so it will be hard to track down for those who have been following it since its festival rounds last year and when trying to find information on the film, you have to try searching under both names. Thankfully, IMDb is smart enough to direct those typing in Emotional Arithmetic to the right page but search engines aren’t quite there yet, which is a shame because it’s a touching and affecting work played brilliantly by the leads via an "old fashioned style" concerned primarily with “the emotional journey of the characters,” as Gabriel Byrne notes in a worthwhile behind the scenes featurette on the DVD.

Additionally, as someone who believes that perhaps there have been so many WWII films that not only has it become its own genre but that some are hard to tell apart, Barzman’s film — like last year’s Oscar winning foreign film The Counterfeiters -- opened my eyes to something of which I was unaware. Instead of forcing Jewish prisoners to counterfeit funds to aid the German effort, in Hearts (and now I believe you’ll agree that title seems entirely inappropriate) I learned about about the existence of Drancy — a transit work camp that existed just outside of Paris, set up by eager French collaborators working with the Nazis as a stopping point before the Jews were transported to death camps.

The film opens in “Quebec’s Eastern Townships region” in September of 1985 as we meet the troubled Melanie Lansing Winters (Susan Sarandon), still haunted by her youth spent in Drancy so much so that she’s taken to devoting her life to collecting data regarding each and every human atrocity committed around the globe. She catalogs them in numerous file cabinets with names, dates, and numbers in the hopes that people will never forget. Married to the cold and bitter professorial husband David Winters (played by Christopher Plummer), as Hearts begins, his mood has also hit an all-time low after he was forced into retirement from academia following a heart attack and plans to sue. Although he seems to blame his wife for her inability to forget the past and move on, her loving and devoted grown son Benjamin (Roy Dupuis) and grandson Timmy (Dakota Goyo) who also live at their large homestead treat Melanie with kid gloves, walking on eggshells and gently reminding her to take her antidepressant medication.

Prone to breakdowns and stress, Melanie seems utterly ecstatic when she manages to get in touch with Jakob Bronski (Max von Sydow), the so-called “Poet of the Gulag,” who looked after her as a young girl in Drancy. After surviving the work camp, and later Auschwitz, and years of electroshock therapy in a psychiatric institution, he has finally been freed and agrees to come stay with Melanie in Canada for awhile. While her husband makes it clear that he’s less than thrilled that Melanie has invited what he fears is yet another most likely memory plagued, “emotionally unstable” survivor from the war to live with them, he’s in for a far ruder awakening when Jakob brings with him a surprise for Melanie. For instead of a trinket or bouquet, the gift arrives in the form of Christopher (Gabriel Byrne), another survivor from Drancy who — much like Sarandon’s character — had also lost his parents.

In black and white flashbacks, we realize the instinctually close bond the three shared in their hellish experience, with Jakob looking after the two kids and, once he was removed, making Christopher promise to take care of Melanie, the young girl with whom he was undoubtedly smitten. Briefly after their reunion at the airport, we realize that Christopher’s love for Melanie has increased considerably and the two awkwardly skirt around their feelings until finally confronting one another about what might have been had they managed to be together following Drancy in one of the film’s most moving scenes.

Although it’s been rightly argued that essentially “the film is designed like a stage play” and “hardly leaves the house or garden,” for this deceptively photographically idyllic (from one of Canada’s most gifted and award-nominated cameramen Luc Montpellier) and dialogue-heavy film, the staging seems not only appropriate but completely necessary to best serve the highly sensitive and relationship-based material. Cinematically, Hearts owes something to the works of Ingmar Bergman and even Woody Allen’s gloomier works like Interiors and September. And while there are endless arguments as everything is bared over the course of a painful yet air-clearing and cathartic twenty-four hour period that does seem a bit melodramatic at times, the actors all make it work and a great deal is equally owed to its talented director.

With a background mostly consisting of television credits and the realization that this is just his second feature film, it’s a remarkable achievement. Additionally, it’s one that seems tailor-made for the filmmaker after a little more digging on IMDb revealed that Barzman himself is no stranger to political conflict and global affairs, having been raised in exile until the early 1970’-s in France as the “son of blacklisted screenwriters Ben Barzman and Norma Barzman” following the McCarthy HUAC hearings of the 1950s. And while I fear that due to the title confusion, it may fall under the radar, in order to prompt you to seek it out (no matter which title you prefer), I’ll leave you with a visual reminder.

Theatrical Trailer: