Original subtitles

A little breakdown in security there.

Oh, what are you doing?

What...

What...

Mixing Hitchcock and new Hollywood,

and still searingly relevant,

Three Days Of The Condor

is a journey into the dark heart of America.

Dizzyingly brilliant,

Sydney Pollack's thriller starts with one of the great opening sequences

in cinema.

Robert Redford's bookish New York researcher

returns from lunch to find his entire office has been assassinated.

And he is well aware that the killers

are going to want to tie up any loose ends.

How would you describe the political climate

in America that Three Days Of The Condor opens in?

Well, it was very complex.

America had been through something of a political upheaval.

Through Vietnam, and then into Watergate.

There was a sense of trauma in the air,

that this great nation could no longer trust

its governing bodies.

It's this idea that corruption

could be found at the highest level.

We can't trust our president, even.

We can't trust where to go next.

And this began to filter down right through

the whole of the way the nation worked.

From elections to the media,

it was a kind of shockwave.

And it was like a wake-up call.

The American Literary Historical Society

is cover for an arm of the CIA

scanning publications for secret codes.

And they've cracked one code too many.

America, at the time,

and I'm old enough to say this, was

erm, in a kind of Watergate frenzy.

When Watergate happened,

over the course of 71 to 73, and just to say,

what Watergate was.

Watergate was the President of the United States, Richard Nixon,

issuing from the Oval Office

a burglary on the Democratic National headquarters

in the Watergate complex in Washington.

Now, you know, we see that, we go, "OK. That's Watergate."

What it was was,

I think, in my whole lifetime,

the biggest political dynamite in the world,

because then you realise

the President of the United States,

the person we elected,

is head of the FBI,

he commands the military,

this guy can do what he wants.

And so the atmosphere in the United States at the time, was...

...the people began, the Constitution begins, "We, the people..."

but it isn't about we, the people.

So, it was all that.

And then you combine the Vietnam war,

which was something that nobody voted for.

And the boys of my generation

were drafted into.

The civil rights era,

with all of us in the street.

All of this is around in the atmosphere,

all of this, and you top it off

with the fact that the President of the United States

is running a covert operation.

Nobody knows about it.

The FBI's involved.

Where in the hell are we?

It's very hard to capture the...

...the sense that was in the country then

because we thought we were going way out on a limb when we did this.

I mean, there was all of this suspicion about the CIA,

but the degree...

of...

what we now call dirty tricks

erm...

the knowledge that we have now, we didn't have them.

All those things had not been published, in fact.

And, as a matter of fact, some of them were published

the week that we were shooting in front of the New York Times itself.

Erm, so...

...working with the writers, we were always a little bit worried

that we were...

that we were going a little too far out on a limb,

when we came up with this oil thing.

And, of course, it was, it turned out not to be very prescient

because very, very shortly, was the big oil embargo happened,

and the oil crisis happened as a matter of fact.

And we began to realise

that a lot of our strategic decisions politically

were, were based on energy and oil.

Er...

But at the time, there was an enormous amount of...

...of cynicism about it.

Released in 1975,

amidst the after-shocks of Watergate,

this sublime exercise in paranoia

takes us on the run with Redford.

Over three terrifying days,

he must evade the killers,

clear his own name,

and root out a conspiracy that goes to the very heart

of the organisation he works for.

So, in 1975,

when Three Days Of The Condor comes out,

it's a deeply fractured situation in America,

at the time, politically.

You have a younger generation of filmmakers

who come in, sort of the first generation

who come from a proper film school background,

and who are looking at the works of European filmmakers,

but who may be, most importantly,

are forged in the fires of the beginnings

of the counterculture period,

and who care about politics.

And if the generation before was a bit more cautious

and careful about what they said in their movies,

this generation was more loud about it.

The public had lost faith in the government,

and also the institutions associated with government,

really from 1969 onwards,

and so the first quarter of the 70s,

was a kind of sea-change

in their opinions and their faith.

Amongst those reasons were the release of the Pentagon papers,

which showed the extent

of America's involvement in the Vietnam War.

And, of course, the Watergate scandal.

The interesting thing about this particular period

from the point of Hollywood,

was that as the cynicism grew amongst the general population,

it coincided with the growth

of the new independent directors.

They suddenly arose,

largely as a result of the success of Easy Rider,

but it did break open the stranglehold of the studios,

which were sort of fading anyway.

And so you had...

directors like Robert Altman,

erm, Sydney Pollack,

er, Alan Pakula,

all those guys who came up and actually called their own shots,

and they could deal with material that previously

would have been thought subversive and would not have got green lit.

This was a great moment for them,

because it meant they could start dealing

with the really serious tropical issues,

and Three Days Of The Condor

was really the first one

to deal with the impact

of CIA dirty tricks.

In Pollack's hands, it is a thriller built around character.

Not only Redford's conflicted hero,

but Faye Dunaway as the innocent woman caught up in his panic.

Cliff Robertson was the contemptuous face of the CIA.

And Max Von Sydow, as a wonderfully debonair assassin.

So, Three Days Of The Condor has to set up

an enormous amount very, very quickly.

How do you describe the opening sequence?

Well, I think, if you want to teach Young filmmakers

about how to begin a film,

how to start a thriller, how to put all your pieces in place,

visually,

look at Three Days Of The Condor.

It's a brilliant opening.

And it's almost casually done.

Sydney Pollack is so adept at making things feel at ease

before he pulls the rug out.

So, what you have is Robert Redford,

who seems to be some kind of bookworm,

this American Literary Historical Society,

who clearly aren't any kind of literary society at all.

They have something to do with the government.

This is kind of unclear. He arrives at work a little late.

We get this idea of him being...

you know, not a rebel,

but certainly one who pushes the system a little bit.

So, what this society does,

and we kind of very quickly realise it must be part of the government,

and it becomes clear it's part of the CIA,

is they analyse text, publications,

for traces of conspiracy,

for ideas that might be propaganda,

for anything that doesn't seem to read well,

and raise it for the CIA.

Now, this was a fictional idea brought up in the novel.

But it was so powerful, the KGB then took it on board

once they'd seen Three Days Of The Condor.

They said, "Well, we're gonna do that."

So, clearly this is a way things can be spread.

This is the Major. This is Joe Turner.

Listen... Identification?

What? "Identification?"

I... My name is Joe Turner. I work for you. Now, listen.

Identify yourself.

I don't... "What is your designation?"

Er, Condor.

Section 9, Department 17. The section's been hit.

What level? What level?

Level of damage?

Everybody!

The context in which this film was made is critical.

America had been torn apart

by the scandals of Vietnam, Watergate and Nixon's downfall.

A sub-genre of psychologically-taut thrillers

fed of this political climate.

Films such as Klute, The Parallax View and The Conversation.

Three Days Of The Condor couldn't be more timely.

And so suddenly, this whole idea of conspiracy,

of trust, was the big talking point everywhere you went.

So, how did Hollywood react to that?

Well, I think there's never been a film-making era

where the style of film has been so attuned

to the real political climate in America.

What we got in the 1970s, what was called new Hollywood,

was a complete reaction to Watergate and Nixon, to Vietnam,

to this idea of...

"We aren't good or bad. We aren't black and white."

And the studios reacted in a very unusual way.

They made very artistic, very intense, very clever films.

We couldn't get to the C...

I mean, what, the problem was that there is no C...

I mean, you know, it's like trying to pick up water,

in your hands.

You make phone calls, and you get shunted around.

I tried to do a certain amount of research before this started,

and I hired a researcher.

And, erm...

all we could do is, sort of, corroborate what Jane corroborated,

which was that there was a...

...a stench in the CIA

that were bookworms.

Whose job it was to check leaks and also get ideas,

from reading these books.

But beyond that, you know, there was nothing much I could do.

Sydney Pollack started out as an actor.

He's from the Midwest.

Er, like me, he decided to go to New York.

This, sort of, Mecca of madness.

And he gets involved with the Neighbourhood Playhouse,

Sanford Meisner.

A kind of parallel to the actor's studio.

In other words, it was very prestigious.

Not in a formal sense.

But in the sense of the new theatre,

the kind of... of...

a working class open theatre.

And he's so good at the Neighbour Playhouse,

the Meisner makes him his assistant,

which is quite stunning.

And then he goes to Hollywood.

And John Frankenheimer, who is his friend...

says, "Come and do," he says, "Come out to Hollywood,

and work with the actors out there,

because a lot of them are Hollywood actors

and the need to sort of get the diction together,

how to speak and all that,

so, come out and work with me on that."

So, he's out there working with the actors.

And Burt Lancaster says to him,

"No, actually you're a director."

And I suppose Burt Lancaster was watching him work with the actors,

so he decides to do some directing.

And he gets to do Alfred Hitchcock hour.

He does The Twilight Zone.

Where a lot of people, sort of, you know,

get their first taste of things, because it came out every week,

anthology series,

you're working with New York actors a lot,

so the whole sort of training, and he knows that.

On the trail, he meets Robert Redford,

who also done a Twilight Zone.

And they become friends.

Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis

optioned the novel Six Days Of The Condor by James Grady,

hoping for a new take on James Bond.

Screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr added relevance.

He both streamlined and complicated the story.

He moved the Washington setting

to a grittier New York.

He switched the hidden MacGuffin from drug dealing to oil.

And he added a sense of urgency.

Even speeding up the pace of the title.

"Three days is plenty," he declared.

So, the book Six Days Of The Condor

was a, sort of, airport bestseller,

it was popular, as genre books were at the time,

especially espionage thrillers.

So, it comes out in 1974.

And by 1975, it's been adapted for the screen.

It's a pretty quick turnaround.

And a lot of that was down to the producer, Dino De Laurentiis,

who saw an opportunity for this kind of material,

and knew that in the spirit of America,

at this time, and in general, the idea of espionage

and who can you trust,

was a big theme.

His key decision was the first choice of screenwriter.

He brought in a man called Lorenzo Semple Jr.

Who was a wily old Hollywood screenwriter.

He had written The Parallax View,

which had been very successful.

Warren Beatty, paranoid political thriller.

It came out a couple of years beforehand.

He knew the terrain.

And he made some very sensible decisions with this pulpy novel.

Because he was a really good writer and, again,

a good reader of the media,

he changed the MacGuffin.

In the book, it's all about drug dealing.

So, the central conspiracy is

a man at the CIA who's kind of infiltrating drug dealing,

for his own evil ends.

What Semple Jr did is he changed it to oil.

So, the CIA are trying to manipulate

countries who are making, developing oil.

Very topical.

Very on, what was going on currently

in the world, in terms of real politic.

So, this pulpy thriller

instantly became a film and a story of the moment.

Initially, Warren Beatty was set to star, with Peter Yates directing.

But Redford's interests changed everything.

He informed De Laurentiis that his old friend Sydney Pollack

had to direct.

After The Way We Were, and Jeremiah Johnson,

this was the third of seven films

Redford would make with Pollack.

One of the great actor-director partnerships.

The original project had Warren Beatty as Joe.

And he was to be directed by Peter Yates, who'd done Bullet.

When Warren Beatty left the project...

...Dino brought in Robert Redford.

Robert Redford was, you know, he'd made a film with Peter Yates,

but Redford said, "I'll only do it if Sydney Pollack can direct it."

Dino then paid off Peter Yates's full fee,

and Sydney Pollack came on board.

So, Sydney Pollack's a director.

Fantastic director, but how did he get chosen to direct this?

Well, if you looked at Pollack's previous films,

you would have said he was an unlikely espionage-style director.

He tended to make, what would be called widescreen American romances.

He loved big stories.

He made The Way We Were,

he made Jeremiah Johnson,

and he shifted around in milieu and genre.

But he liked big stories.

And very romantic stories.

And he loved stars. He loved performances.

So, the idea of a very tense clockwork thriller

doesn't immediately fit.

As far as Redford was concerned,

he was the best director of Redford.

He was the guy who understood him as an actor.

So, he brought Pollack on.

And when Pollack came in, he said he was just, sort of,

intrigued by the chance to do this kind of material.

By the time that the project came along for Robert Redford,

he was already a huge star.

He had seen his success rise

abruptly after Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid.

He'd been a TV actor before that,

and done a number of other roles, but it was Butch Cassidy

And The Sundance Kid that brought him to huge prominence.

And he went from strength to strength in the 70s,

largely with his director, Sydney Pollack,

who, the two of them would have a long-lasting collaboration.

He was a huge star.

He was a great romantic lead.

And people loved him.

I mean, you know, apart from the fact

that he was excessively good-looking, he was a good actor.

And he could do the stuff.

So, he was a huge star

to take on this role,

which was fairly, a bit of a change for him, in fact.

This was quite a challenge for him.

Although it appealed to his, his own sort of philosophy,

in his own, you know,

democratic sensibilities, as it were.

He, it made him, he came across as a bit of a nerd.

He's a bit of a, sort of,

bookish-librarian type,

who happens to have a brain.

But he's not particularly brave or action packed.

He has to learn as he's going along,

as he's escaping, to somehow,

use his unconventionality,

to escape, and that shows his resourcefulness.

Now, what happened was through a series of friends

and political connections,

mostly through Redford...

...we got to Helms.

And Helms's attitude was very cavalier.

For some reason, he was not sensorial at all.

He came into the trailer,

he had a lot of bodyguards around.

Er,

I mean, there were a lot of guys

with walkie-talkies and the ear things.

And I felt a little weird when he was in the trailer.

I didn't know what to ask him.

You know? I didn't want to insult him.

But I, but I kind of implied...

I sort of set up the scene for him that he was going to watch.

He hadn't read the script.

And I set up this, sort of, rogue operation idea for him.

He just kind of grinned.

He said, he just, he seemed very happy to be there.

And loved listening to this whole intrigue, and it all seemed fine.

Every moment, for me, in this movie

is something that we have,

at that time, unconsciously, in ourselves.

It's almost like an affirmation

of everything at the time

that we, especially young people,

thought was happening.

So that, in fact,

it is a movie, but it also becomes a series of vignettes,

where you are literally sitting in the cinema, going,

"Wow!" And you freeze it. You freeze it a little bit.

At the time, I'm not saying now.

But at the time, you froze the image.

You froze the mailman coming into, guy coming in as the mailman.

And then, actually, he's an assassin.

You freeze that, and you think that that is the way it is.

That's the way America is.

When Redford said at the end, he said,

"I gave it to the New York Times,"

and the CIA operative, Cliff Robertson, says,

"How do you know they're gonna printed it?"

"Yeah," you think to yourself. That's what I feel.

While very much a film of its age,

Three Days Of The Condor varies markedly

from its 70s contemporaries.

It's more classical.

In the vein of Hitchcock's Wrong Man thrillers,

The 39 Steps and North By Northwest.

It still has hints of the Bond-style caper

everyone involved had fooled themselves they were making.

Pollack kept reiterating,

"He just set out to make a movie."

Listen, please don't hurt me!

Where do you live?

Where'd you live! - Brooklyn Heights. - Alone?

I live with a friend.

You live alone. Come on, let's go.

Tentrex Industries.

It's a cover. I work for the CIA.

Oh, Jesus!

Your assignment for today was to go out and kidnap a girl.

Look it up. Tentrex... Industries!

And look up the number for the CIA in New York.

You mean, they're listed like my aunt Gladys?

Under US government agencies. Go on.

Is this what you do?

This? Photography?

OK. I...

It's the same number.

Here is a powerful reminder

that Robert Redford was so much more than a pretty face.

He was a cipher for a paranoid age.

The American ideal battling corruption.

Joe Turner was a radical departure for him.

A cerebral character, rather than a man of action.

Indeed, because Joe Turner is no field agent,

his moves are unpredictable.

A desperate character, willing to test his own boundaries.

Well, if you boil it down and say,

"Right, this is an espionage thriller," it's a very talky,

it's very performance-driven,

it's very stylish in the sense of the way it shoots people.

There's action in it, but it's relatively minimal.

It's very realistic, plus it brings a slightly contradictory,

what I'd call a playful edge to it.

An absurdity.

He gives it this Dave Grusin jazz score.

He plays around with the idea

that, is this real? You know?

What's going through Redford's head is this sense of,

"Can I believe this? The world's become Alice in Wonderland.

I was going to my job, and I come back and everyone's dead.

Can this be real?"

And I love the idea that Pollack is testing our ability

to believe in the immaterial.

There's certain moments in the film, such as when Joe Turner meets Kathy,

that echo Hitchcock's Wrong Man's thrillers,

like 39 Steps and North By Northwest.

Do you think these are influences?

Why did Pollack have those in there?

So, you could look at the storyline.

A man on the run. An innocent man who becomes accused of killing.

And he takes, well, he kidnaps, basically, an innocent woman

to help, to give him a safe haven and clear his name.

Basically he has to find the source of the conspiracy,

to try and save himself.

That's the plot of The 39 Steps.

That's kind of partly the plot of North By Northwest.

So, it's very Hitchcockian.

It has that idea of the ordinary man thrust into the extraordinary.

It's not fully Hitchcockian, because we do have the CIA,

Joe Turner is, on one level, an agent.

But it still has that idea of

there's something of an ordinary man about him,

confronting extraordinary forces.

The character of Kathy was as much a departure for Faye Dunaway.

She's an innocent, kidnapped by the desperate Joe,

looking for a safe haven.

A terrified but decent figure, not knowing who she can trust.

For Pollack, their relationship is the central metaphor for the film.

A microcosm of America at large.

If Dunaway brought any baggage from Bonnie And Clyde or Chinatown,

well, so much the better.

He runs away, he gets away,

and then he kidnaps Faye Dunaway.

Now, freeze the frame there, as well.

This is Faye Dunaway.

This is another movie star,

whose parts are very complex.

There's Faye Dunaway in this car.

And you think, "Well, what's going to happen here next?"

She, you have to think to yourself,

that she took the role because she believed in it.

But also because she's an actor.

She wanted to try something.

So, it's a very strange part for Faye Dunaway to take,

because she's, sort of, like, a

mousy, kind of subjugated, that's what she's playing.

And so we're watching

the duel between these two,

and we're also, and maybe this is Pollack's intention,

maybe this is Redford's intention,

is for us to ask, "What's going to happen next?"

Because this is Faye Dunaway.

So, something is going to happen.

This isn't everything that we think it is.

And, of course, turned out to be true. It isn't what we think it is.

Faye Dunaway is an interesting one for this kind of part,

because she is essentially an ordinary woman,

a photographer, living in the city,

who is going about her daily business,

getting ready to go on a ski trip with her boyfriend,

who remains unseen in the film,

and then Redford has a gun, and snatches her up off the street,

as a kind of rouse, as a hostage,

in order to find some safety with a stranger.

So, she's in a hostage situation, and she's extremely vulnerable.

And Dunaway didn't usually play vulnerable that often.

She played ice queens often.

Or she played women with a really, kind of, aloof exterior.

Even in Bonnie And Clyde, her breakout role,

she's maybe a little bit less aloof, but she's...

she is a sort of opaque. You're really understand

what all of her motivation is,

there is a kind of violence and frenzy about her.

She's often unlikeable.

In this film, she's very sympathetic,

because she's completely taken by surprise by the situation.

And is spending most of it

in terror and fear for her safety, and for her life.

What's also interesting about the role,

and this romantic subplot,

is that it does divide opinion, I think.

I think some people do see it as being so implausible

that you would almost get Stockholm syndrome immediately

and fall for somebody who is pointing a gun at you.

He does probably stretch the realms of realism.

But I don't really think realism is what the film is going for here.

The film is going, "This is Faye Dunaway, and this is Robert Redford,

and the star power of their combined chemistry."

Bringing an aura of European class,

Max von Sydow was Bergman's muse.

The film's ostensible villain is so refreshing,

with his mix of aristocratic charm and pragmatism.

"The why is not important as you bear.

Only the when and how much."

Such delicious detail.

The unwavering eloquence.

The impeccable houndstooth coat.

His dedication to painting model soldiers.

Von Sydow offers the tidy face of amorality.

A man unburdened by ideals.

It would happen this way.

You may be walking.

Maybe the first sunny day of the spring.

And a car will slow beside you.

And a door will open.

And someone you know,

maybe even trust...

...will get out of the car.

And he will smile a becoming smile.

But he will leave open the door of the car.

And offer to give you a lift.

You seem to understand it all so well.

The casting of the Swedish actor Max von Sydow is a stroke of genius.

He, of course, grew up,

we grew up with him in Ingmar Bergman films.

But he quite swiftly made the transition

to Hollywood, and, in fact, other parts of the world.

It was a relief for him to take this role.

In spite of the fact that he's a, sort of, putative villain.

Because he had much greater depth

as Joubert,

the lead assassin.

Max von Sydow is a great actor.

He's a great international actor.

He is...

He played Christ, Jesus Christ, even,

in a movie a couple of years earlier.

He's, of course, in the great Ingmar Bergman cinema,

the star of it.

A great actor in terms of,

if you know anything about the cinema,

you know about Max von Sydow.

He's always the good guy, though.

He's always good. He's always got radiance around him.

And so he enters the picture,

and there's so much paranoia in this movie,

so much paranoia in America,

this guy comes in,

he's got a European accent,

he's very, and I'm thinking about the general audience,

who would maybe not know Von Sydow.

Maybe just from the biblical pictures that he made.

So, you think, "Uh-oh!

Uh-oh! What is this?"

And he comes in. He's very cool. He's very calm.

He tells Robert Redford's character, exactly the way things are gonna be.

And... only...

a European could do that

at that point in the history of American cinema.

Only somebody from the outside can actually do that.

The conniving schemes of the CIA

are embodied in a set of ageing men in suits,

sitting behind desks as if playing a game of chess.

Cold-hearted representatives

of the hidden America.

Cliff Robertson is the by any means necessary, real politic philosophy.

The great John Houseman is the old school realist.

And Addison Powell is the supervisor who pursues American interests

whatever the cost.

Then there are some great supporting performances

from major actors.

Cliff Robertson as this apparently trustworthy CIA man.

Who is in fact on the take.

And is, you know, completely able to rationalise

his, his attitude towards the, you know,

he believes it's patriotism for the greater good.

So, these are all really believable characters.

And Pollack felt it was really important to give

even, kind of, the moustache-twirling villain,

a point of view.

How would you describe Joe's CIA bosses and their approach to him?

The kind of people they are?

In the sense, how the CIA are depicted

is crucial to understanding Three Days Of The Condor.

And the American it portrays.

So, what Joe comes to realise very quickly

is that he can't trust his bosses.

So, the first thing he tries to do

is call, "Bring me in, there's been an assassination."

Things get complicated and knotty pretty quickly.

They say, "We'll bring someone to get you."

The person who tries to get him tries to kill him.

So, Joe thinks,

"This is closer to home than I expected.

This isn't some kind of foreign insurgence,

this is my own bosses."

So, that is the shockwave, that is the Watergate-esque shockwave

that runs them through the film.

But the beauty of the film,

and the beauty of the writing, is how the CIA are then depicted.

And they're depicted as a kind of set of elders,

these men behind desks.

They aren't, sort of,

Gothic villains, in any old-fashioned sort of sense.

They are suits.

Cliff Robertson as Mr Higgins.

Who essentially actually isn't a villain.

There's a corrupt part of the CIA that he doesn't even know about.

But he certainly can't be trusted.

He's just trying to do his job.

There is this lovely sense of

what happened to the CIA is an embarrassment.

And they kind of want to clean up the embarrassment.

That's how they treat living people.

You've just got to cover up what's happened.

It's not good for the CIA.

So, there's all these scenes between Cliff Robertson and his boss,

Mr Wabash, who's played by the great John Houseman.

He once worked with Orson Welles. Mercury Theatre.

He has an American tradition.

Another lovely piece of Pollack casting.

And what he brings

is this sense of old school CIA.

He has a very lovely speech,

when he talks about, "I was with the OSS during World War II.

I worked with William Donovan,"

who was a real figure in the American Secret Service.

And he says this beautiful line, he says,

"I've missed the clarity."

And what he says is that the world no longer has good or bad in it.

It's all about methods.

It's all about calculation.

It's all about by any means necessary.

Through Pollack's tight editing,

lingering close-ups and sullen shadows,

Joe is trapped in an almost Kafka-esque nightmare,

where he can no longer trust anyone.

It is perhaps wrong to call this a paranoid thriller.

They really are out to get him.

The film is fuelled by Joe's stress.

There is something of John Le Carre's cynicism here, too.

The idea that espionage is ultimately just a game.

I personally have never, ever felt,

when I was working on a film that I was...

you know, it was going to become a special film of any kind.

You just, you hope it's not an embarrassment.

I mean, you're not, you're not, you don't,

your, your, your sights are always high.

I don't mean that you don't hope in some way that,

you hope everything is a great everything. You know?

I mean, you daydream always about making something

that will last and that will be wonderful.

But the realities of film making...

er, level that feeling,

if you have any degree of sanity.

I mean, you can get carried away

and imagine that you're some sort of genius or something.

But that just doesn't happen, as a rule.

The problems to solve

on a day-to-day and moment by moment basis,

are what you're trying to do.

And you're always, I'm always surprised when...

you know, when it works.

Er, you get it together, it works,

and then every once in a while it really becomes a film

that... that... sticks around for a while.

I don't think there's any way you can predict that.

And I think if you polled...

er, directors, they would, I think they would agree with me.

While you're working on a film, you don't...

I've never talked to a director who said,

"You know, I knew the first day I went to work

this was gonna be a great film."

You're just too concerned with the problem.

Pollack expertly frames his characters

against the bustling, heedless streets of New York

in the lead up to Christmas.

Shooting on location,

Manhattan has never been more claustrophobic,

as if the alleyways and bridges were closing in on Joe.

This made for a fraught shoot.

But Pollack knew that there were textures and details

you could get nowhere else.

Significant, this is a film about technology.

The spy genre was moving with the times.

The intricacies of wiretapping,

text scanning, computers the size of fridge freezers,

and great 70s phone acting,

reveal the film's prophetic power.

Pollack was flabbergasted to find his film growing in relevance,

as post-Watergate reports leaked,

revealing the extent of the CIA's dirty tricks.

There's no doubt about it that this film is also about technology,

and how it is used in covert ways.

Erm, especially in Spy Game.

In fact, it's from the very opening credit sequence,

as Joe is cycling through the traffic,

the actual words on the screen

are a sort of computerised script.

So, you think, "OK. Fine."

So, you've got immediately a sign that technology

is gonna play a big role in it.

You could say that the film was about the rise of technology,

and in espionage,

although, at the time, that wouldn't have been apparent.

But, erm...

if you look back on it now,

Redford's character

is kind, he's a literary man, but also grounded in machines.

He understands them.

And we are beginning to understand them

at this point in the ark of history,

about how much they are shaping our destiny,

how much they are in command, in control of things.

And the movie shows, maybe, the...

the bifurcation between this literary man

and book, a book, and a machine.

And suddenly, and this just comes to me,

you begin to see the machine aspect take over this movie.

Of course a police state uses technology

to keep the firm eye on its citizens.

In this film,

do you think there is a use of technology

that involves? And also, how does Joe Turner's ability

with technology allow him to turn the tables at certain points?

Yeah, I think this is something...

very important about what Three Days Of The Condor does.

Is it introduces almost a new form of thriller.

The techno-thriller. Which became more and more

important and prominent.

What was being analysed here, if you want,

was the point of inflection in American espionage

when the old techniques,

the old spying,

was moving into a technological age.

Where data, and computers,

and text analysis,

were becoming the medium by which...

people were sought. There's a great deal of,

kind of, business given over to tracking Joe down

using phone lines and maps.

And you think, you can imagine this film

being set in the 2020s,

and digital technology being used.

This is the beginning of the idea of...

...paranoia moving into a different medium.

The brief bursts of violence

are shockingly quick and bloody.

Redford makes hair raising escapes,

and sets his own ingenious traps.

It is all intensely realistic.

In an ironic touch,

Joe and his fellow researchers

examine spy novels

for signs of real conspiracy.

It's funny to see Redford

in a role as somebody who is, kind of, bookish,

because although he was a very intelligent person in life,

he often physically favoured the jock, or the cowboy,

or the romantic lead.

But he was, increasingly throughout his career,

drawn to and interested in

more heady and liberal roles.

And we see that following it up,

with All The President's Men,

another wonderful thriller that was contemporary to its time.

So, here he,

he does quite a good job

of, in as much as you can believe,

that he is a nerd, looking like he does,

er, you...

believe that this is somebody

who has chosen a life at the mines,

and that's his primary interest.

And he does it with a little bit of cockiness.

Because, in that way that somebody who is very, very clever

has sometimes a bit of pomposity about them,

we see that at the beginning,

and then we see it just completely crumble

in the face of the violence and shock and confusion

of what happens.

A lot of people who are contemporary viewers

or who visited the film for the first time

have also commented on

what a fashion inspiration Redford is in the movie.

He's got these great, gold aviator specs

and the turned up black wool pea coat,

to the point that people are saying that the film is actually

just about a man who dresses so fly

that the CIA want him dead.

Three Days Of The Condor concludes on a chilling note.

Robertson's Higgins delivers his cold-hearted speech to Joe,

and to the audience,

"This is the way this civilisation works.

Get used to it."

As the Salvation Army sings in the background,

Joe slips away into the streets.

He may never come in from the cold.

This is deeply, deeply cynical, of course.

Because it involves the loss of life, human life.

It involves war.

It involves coos in certain places.

The CIA have obviously been targeted from time to time,

the spotlight is always put on them as villains, something like this.

But this is international.

You know? This goes on all the time.

These covert operations.

There are two levels, or at least two levels

below the official organisation.

In Joe's words, he said, "Do you mean there's a CIA inside the CIA?"

And it has to be admitted,

you know, Higgins,

the wonderful Cliff Robertson, with his amazingly weird toupee,

another cover-up, if you like,

erm, says, "Yeah." Says, "It's a game."

One of the biggest box office draws of 1975,

it's still remarkable how prescient

Three Days Of The Condor turned out to be.

This is both fantasy

and historical document.

Or maybe reality was becoming more like a Hollywood thriller.

The central secret involves the CIA's attempt

to destabilise foreign regimes for their oil.

Technology was being put to dubious use.

And eerily, the CIA office was located in the World Trade Center.

We were already positioned, as an audience,

to be ready for this film.

This film said things that we were saying to ourselves,

and to our friends.

It was being said out loud.

This film, without the mask and the cloak of a period piece,

like The Godfather, or a sci-fi thing like Star Wars,

this film put us in the present,

and asked the questions directly.

Not with metaphor.

Not with anything that the other movies, great movies did.

This asked the question directly.

And it asked the question

through an all-American actor

who had the courage to actually be on screen

and ask the question.

So, you couldn't run away from Robert Redford.

You couldn't pigeonhole him as an Italian, New York Italian,

like you could Robert De Niro or...

You had, he was as American as apple pie.

And he asked the questions.

And that is the power

of the movie.

And that is a credit to him,

as an actor,

and as a human being.

So, in a sense,

I think the movie will grow

as the country matures and understands itself.

I mean come you could also say what an influential film

Three Days Of The Condor has become.

Here are the seeds of the Bourne films.

Here is that idea of

your central character is a James Bond figure,

but desperate and human.

It is this humanising of the bond idea.

I think even late Bond films

probably draw back on Three Days Of The Condor,

to try and develop their character,

into a way that makes it just much more interesting.

If we relate, you know, then we get scared.

And I think that's the key.

And what Pollack does, and Redford do,

is they make you relate and understand this landscape.

About a brilliant thing for a movie to be doing.

Three Days Of The Condor is hugely influential.

Redford became a figurehead of the era.

When not on set, he was busy preparing for his next role,

that of Bob Woodward in All The President's Men.

Dunaway would go on to Network.

Pollack would revisit similar themes

in The Firm and The Interpreter.

Filled with distrust, suspicion, and institutional corruption,

this remarkable thriller grows more relevant by the year.

Hey, Turner.

How do you know they'll print it?

You can take a walk.

But how far if they don't print it?

They'll print it.

How do you know?

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