Encore Holiday Special: 'Tis the Season for "Three Days of the Condor"
“I'm not a field agent, I just read books!”
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Bit ‘n’ Bobs
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I was sad to hear that Renato Giancarlo Vicario, the Italian-born co-owner of Vicario Distillery and Farm in Greenville, South Carolina, and author of Italian Liqueurs: The History and Art of a Creation, passed away on December 6 at the age of 77. I first met Renato and his wife Janette Wesley in 2016 when Amaro came out and later had the opportunity to co-present with him at BevCon in Charleston on the subject of amaro and Italian liqueurs. I last saw him this summer at a portfolio tasting here in New York and always enjoyed our time together, however brief. Sending my love and condolences Janette and their family and friends.
Don’t you think a signed copy of any of my books (Bitters, Amaro, Distillery Cats, Last Call) would make a welcome and spirited gift this holiday season? Me too! Tomorrow (Tuesday, December 12) is the deadline to order signed copies to ship out before Christmas. The cost is the list price of the book plus shipping and handling ($6.00 USPS Media Mail) within contiguous United States. Email me for details.
To celebrate this past weekend’s release of Poor Things, the new film from Yorgos Lanthimos featuring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe, Dante partnered with Fords Gin and Searchlight Pictures to create the official cocktail of the picture—a limited-edition Martini inspired by Stone’s character, Bella Baxter. Available exclusively at Dante West Village and Dante Beverly Hills through this Friday, the Bella Martini—inspired by ingredients from five locations Bella visits in the film, including London, Paris, and Lisbon—is composed of Fords Gin, French vermouth (Noilly Prat and Dolin), white port, Peruvian pisco, rosewater, and a drop of blue Curaçao.
Sammi Katz and Olivia McGiff, the author and artist behind the book Cocktails in Color, are sharing a 12 Days of Cocktails Giveaway as a thank you to readers and as a way to pay it forward, giving away 12 original cocktail paintings (6x9, gouache paint on watercolor paper) from the book. The offer expires tomorrow (Tuesday, December 12)—see full details. (Read the LAST CALL interview with Sammi and Olivia.)
In today’s Encore Holiday Special (first published December 19, 2022) I break down, beat by beat, why, in the tradition of Eyes Wide Shut, Syndey Pollack’s 1975 paranoid thriller Three Days of the Condor should be considered a Christmas movie, and why I watch it every Christmas Eve. I hope after reading this you’ll give it a watch this December.
Three Days of the Condor Is a Christmas Movie
(Even though it first premiered 47 years ago, I should alert you that spoilers for Three Days of the Condor appear throughout this dispatch.)
By now everyone knows, and is likely tired of hearing about, the seasonal stance that Die Hard is a Christmas movie. There are movies like It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street that are holiday traditions—they’re about Christmas and you watch them during the holiday season. Animated and stop-motion entertainment like A Charlie Brown Christmas, Emmett Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, The Grinch, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer also fall into this category, but so do more modern movies like Elf, Scrooged, Home Alone, Love Actually, and The Family Stone. And The Hallmark Channel and Lifetime have around-the-clock seasonal programming dedicated to formulaic holiday love stories.
But along with Die Hard there’s a number of films set during Christmas, but not necessarily about Christmas, that continue to climb their way onto Top Christmas Movies roundups, pictures like Less Than Zero, Eyes Wide Shut, Gremlins, Lethal Weapon, Trading Places, and Batman Returns. At the top of the list would be one of my favorite Christmas movies, and one I watch every December, the 1975 paranoia-fueled thriller Three Days of the Condor.
The first time I saw it was when I was home from college on Christmas break in the late ‘80s. One night after midnight I was watching TV in the darkened den when Three Days of the Condor came on as the late-night movie on WPIX, a New York City station. I knew nothing about it but the opening credits had barely wrapped up when most of the cast of characters we’ve just been introduced to are taken out by a trio of mysterious assassins with silencer-capped machine guns.
Based on James Grady’s bestselling 1974 novel, Six Days of the Condor, Three Days of the Condor—directed by Sydney Pollack with a screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Rayfiel—truncates the timeline of the book and moves the primary setting from Washington, DC, to New York City. Filmed on location in the fall of 1974, with scenes shot at the Guggenheim, the Ansonia, Central Park, the World Trade Center, and the Brooklyn Bridge, Three Days of the Condor is not only a Christmas movie, but a New York movie.