Arriving back to the scene of the massacre, Turner tries to call it in to his bosses only to find himself on the lam without a plan. His rainy day lunch shortcut is to prove his saviour when he happens to be ordering a reuben to go when an assassin (Max von Sydow) and his crew target the team. Ostensibly working for the American Literary Historical Society, it is really a front for an obscure arm of the CIA who read books for a living in a bid to uncover codes or a titbit of spy fiction that can be put to use in the real world. He brings a twinkly everyman quality to Joseph Turner, an anti-authority type, who turns up late to work, doesn't wear a tie and sneaks out the back way for lunch, smoothing over his shortcomings with a winning smile. Although he lost his first choice, Warren Beatty, to The Parallax View (also co-scripted by Lorenzo Semple Jr), Robert Redford was no box office slouch, having already become a household name via films such as Barefoot In The Park, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, The Sting and The Great Gatsby. Pollack definitely scored in terms of his leading man. Sydney Pollack's Three Days Of The Condor was one of a cohort of films, including The Parallax View and The Conversation and, of course, All The President's Men, that fed on a belief in conspiracy theories bolstered by the 1972 Watergate Scandal - but while its thriller elements deliver, the film is undermined by a subplot that was surely over-egged even when it was made and which has only been further diminished by the passage of time.
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