BRUCE BAWER: Revisiting Three Days of the Condor. A top-notch thriller turns fifty.

Like Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), Joe’s being targeted by spies for reasons he can’t fathom — and, to save his life, needs to figure out why. Thornhill’s search takes him from New York to Chicago to Rapid City; Joe’s, from New York to Washington and back. Neither of them is a superman — neither is above expressing fear and confusion — but under the circumstances, both of them are impressively unflappable, determined to get the answers. And to survive.

I’ve mentioned North by Northwest. Even more similar to Condor, plot point by plot point, is another Hitchcock thriller, The 39 Steps (1935). What distinguishes Condor from these earlier films is its post-Watergate paranoia and cynicism. The late, great critic John Simon it “an elegy of private, political, and, finally, cosmic pessimism, a kind of national, if not indeed metaphysical guilt film to enchant the disenchanted.” Hovering over the whole thing, he added, was “the vague but all-inclusive malaise of Watergate.” Yes, Graham Greene and John Le Carre had been there before, even prior to Watergate. But Condor struck the perfect balance between capturing the truly palpable pessimism of a unique national-historical moment and providing classic Hollywood entertainment of the first order.

Written by Lorenzo Semple Jr,. and David Rayfiel and based on James Grady’s 1974 Six Days of the Condor (which I remember devouring avidly on a long family car trip), Condor would be followed by decades of other action thrillers — the Jason Bourne and Mission: Impossible and Taken franchises, the later James Bond pictures, and many, many others. But in these pictures the paranoia was invariably a pose, the cynicism a reflex, the darkness merely aesthetic. Not so in Condor, where it was a part of the Zeitgeist.

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