Designing The Movies: THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR

 

 

 

 

Get into the holiday spirit with a paranoid conspiracy thriller! That’s right: this classic political suspense drama is a Christmas movie. In Sydney Pollack’s adaption of James Grady’s bestselling political thriller, bookish CIA analyst Joe (Robert Redford) returns to the office from lunch to find all his colleagues dead. A high-stakes game of hide and seek ensues while Joe figures out who to trust, trying to stay alive long enough to discover why the government agency wants him dead.

 

 

Besides its atmosphere of unrelenting tension and paranoia, this on-the-run spy thriller is also a great New York movie, with scenes filmed on location at the Guggenheim, the Ansonia, Central Park, the World Trade Center, and Brooklyn Bridge. With a murderers row of character actors like John Houseman, Cliff Robertson, and Max von Sydow and a weird burgeoning romance with Faye Dunaway (the stranger Joe briefly holds hostage—yes really!) and featuring tweed sports jackets and a pea coat for the ages, Three Days of the Condor has spawned a Toronto-filmed TV series and an homage in Steven Soderbergh’s in Out of Sight, and is more resonant today than it was upon release in the immediate aftermath of Watergate.

 

 

Presented with an introduction by series host Nathalie Atkinson.