Three Days of the Condor (1975)

I am the kind of person who is unable to follow the intricate stories of political thrillers. I often get lost somewhere and most of the time I simply don't care enough to pick up on the hints. Three Days of the Condor (dir. Sydney Pollack) is in fact a movie that might merit from this sloppy attitude to watching movies. Everything seems extremely complicated but the most important thing is the feeling of something big and complicated going on. When I realized what was the center of the scheming and paranoid outbursts I was disappointed. Robert Redford has the typical thriller function: he's the innocent bookish guy working for an obscure institution. Oh wait, there's something else going on. He's working for the CIA and his job is about looking for codes in foreign languages. It so happens that suddenly, all of his colleagues are shot dead (while he is out of the office, fortunately). Who's after him? Why is he a threat and to whom? A love story - or some kind of love story involving a great, sharp-mouthed Faye Dunaway- is thrown in for good measure and voila we have the recipe for a VERY 70's American political thriller about .... oil and stuff. Redford paws around in white sneakers, innocent-looking while the big guys are trying to hunting him down. The settings are murky and we are thrown into a universe where nobody is to be trusted and especially not government agencies. If you are not convinced that this is for you, reconsider: Max von Sydow plays an assassin and eveything about this movie is soaked in the kind of brown-greys that enhance the gruff corners of New York in a way that create a feeling of danger in the midst of ordinary life. Even for a person not really dedicated to political thrillers, this was watchable.