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.

No, It's Not Just You, There's a Conspiracy: 'The Parallax View'

Don't be fooled by the cop car chases through mud and the Charlie's Angels soundtrack of the trailer above, Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View is one slow-burning, mysterious, smart as hell film. Released amidst the wiretapping Watergate fiasco and Nixon's eventual resignation, and just a few years after the tumultuous assassination-heavy '60s, this film appears smack dab in the new Hollywood of the '70s; antiheroes are the norm and paranoia is on the mind.

Parallax, like Three Days of the Condor (another '70s political paranoia thriller to be covered by this blog) was written by screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. with the darkest sense of humor and the smartest edge of right-wing political jabbing.

Warren Beatty is a journalist trying to uncover the truth about a senator's assassination at the top of Seattle's Space Needle. Fellow journalist and wonderfully acted neurotic Paula Prentiss is convinced anyone witness to this shooting is being killed off themselves by a shadowy group. How right she is.

Beatty's search leads from dead end to murdered personal contact. In order to infiltrate this mysterious Parallax Corporation, he puts himself in the mind (or the position of the available employee applicant, more accurately) to join the ranks of would-be assassins.

The film's infamous "brainwashing scene" is a bit hokey by today's standards but I'm sure made quite an impact then in the more innocent, pre-internet, pre-ADHD age. The first modern filmic instance of this might have been Alex's (Malcom McDowell) "visually restrained" brainwash/torture in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

Instead of rehabilitation as the goal, like in Clockwork, it's subliminal advertising to recruit killers. How would this ring true today and what scary/scarier tactics would be used? Virtual reality sensurround simulation/stimulation?

Think of this in today's terms, on this day of Trump's inauguration: "The Parallax Corporation/___ (fill in the blank with a contemporary international corporation's name) Division of Human Engineering."

Frightening.

 

"We hope you find the test a pleasant experience."