Three Days of the Condor

Three Days of the Condor (1975) is a Cold War political thriller directed by Sydney Pollack, now available to watch online on iFILM. Robert Redford plays Joe Turner, a low-level CIA researcher codenamed Condor who spends his days reading spy novels for patterns. One afternoon he steps out for lunch. When he comes back, every person in his office is dead.

Turner radios headquarters. The extraction point they arrange turns out to be a kill zone. Suddenly the only person he can drag into his corner is a stranger named Kathy — played by Faye Dunaway — whom he pulls off the street at gunpoint. He's not a field agent. He has no backup, no cover, no weapon. Just a mind trained to spot patterns in fiction, now hunting for one in reality. Cliff Robertson plays his handler, Max von Sydow a meticulous hired gun operating in the shadows.

Pollack made this film in the year after Watergate — the timing landed it squarely in America's deepest post-Vietnam, post-CIA-scandal distrust of institutions. Adapted from James Grady's novel Six Days of the Condor, the film ends on a question that still hasn't been answered. Stream Three Days of the Condor (1975) online on iFILM.