Encore Presentation: 'Tis the Season for "Three Days of the Condor"
“I'm not a field agent, I just read books!”
In today’s Encore Presentation I’m taking down the paywall on a LAST CALL holiday chestnut first published on December 19, 2022 where 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 (it’s available to stream on Hulu, Paramount+, and Amazon Prime Video).
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Three Days of the Condor Is a Christmas Movie
(Even though it first premiered 49 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.
"The section's been hit. Everyone's dead."
The opening set piece takes place at the American Literary Historical Society, an Upper East Side townhouse that serves as the field office of Section 17 of the CIA. (The location used was the American Irish Historical Society at 55 East 77th Street and Madison Avenue). Robert Redford plays Joseph “Joe” Turner (codename “Condor”), a CIA analyst whose job is to read books, magazines, newspapers, and even comics to scan and cross-check them using the of-the-era giant computer banks to identify possible coded messages planted by US agents or foreign operatives. His recent report of an obscure book that has suddenly been translated in the Middle East, Mexico, and the Netherlands is what sparks the hit on his workplace and puts him on the run trying to get to the bottom of this mystery while fighting to stay alive.
In recent years, Three Days of the Condor has also became a darling of the mens’ fashion sites and look-books, primarily for Robert Redford’s stylish, timeless fits. The movie is set over 72 hours and, with a few modifications, Turner’s wearing the same clothes throughout the movie. It’s a mix of classic New England preppy style and rumpled college professor chic—from his hiking boots and light-blue Levi’s, to his boat-neck navy-blue sweater worn over a Western-accented chambray shirt, and striped Ralph Lauren necktie.
When we first see Redford as Turner he’s riding his Solex bike to work wearing his go-to outfit with a royal blue knit cap on his head, a gray herringbone blazer, black leather gloves, a thick tan scarf, and gold-rimmed aviator-style glasses. Once he makes it to the office, and after he goes on the run, he leaves the hat and scarf behind and in his travels swaps the blazer for a sharp-looking navy peacoat just made for popping the collar.