Endangered Species: 'Three Days of the Condor'

"You people think that not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?"

I titled this piece 'Endangered Species' because of the rarity of real, or should I say "real" (it's the movies after all) political thrillers that reflect society at large today.

The '70s seemed to be full of them: The Conversation, All the President's Men, The Parallax View, just to name a few. Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor can be added to the list. Released dead center of the '70s, after the end of Nixon /Watergate and Vietnam, Condor has the same paranoid, don't trust the government, conspiracy vibe as some of the best of this decade.

Robert Redford stars as Joe Turner, a low-level CIA researcher in NYC (code name: Condor) who comes back to his office after lunch to find that all his co-workers have been shot dead. He immediately escapes the office and is on the lam from mysterious assassins trying to kill him as well.

While on the run, Redford encounters Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway) in a shop and forces her to provide him a hiding place in her apartment. During his short stay, they instantly fall in love. It's a bit of a silly plot point but with Redford and Dunaway in their beautiful primes, maybe it's believable?

An assassin (the always fantastic Max Von Sydow) is out on a CIA "clean-up" contract to kill Turner and protect info on a covert/rogue CIA operation to take over big oil in the Middle East. I won't go into the details here about the nefarious plot twists to silence the rogue plan but suffice to say it's all very believable 42 years later that the same thing could happen today.

I might semi-spoil the ending but suffice to say "going to the New York Times to leak the overarching CIA plot" may not be the happy ending that Turner is hoping for. It was the '70s and some of these new Hollywood films loved a freeze-framed, downer ending.

In 1975 when "news" meant newspapers, magazines, and three network TV channels and cynicism and distrusting the media was a bit less robust. But debunking lies and "fake news" conspiracies is racing back into the public eye in America, and with good reason.

Just in time for me to say this movie deserves a great reboot to modernize the storyline but still keep the paranoid tension and distrust that is the movie's core, there is a remake filming this spring in Toronto for a ten-episode TV series.

Looking at the news, real and fake, I'm sure the writers have all the inspiration they need.