Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1975)

It's been awhile since I've seen one of these good ol'-fashioned '70s paranoid thrillers. I watched Coppola's The Conversation and Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men a long time ago. Coincidentally, and I'm sure someone has written about this somewhere, at the end of Condor I saw a perfect segue into All the President's Men, which came out a year later.

The most obvious similarity is Robert Redford playing the crusading hero fighting against corruption that goes up to unfathomable heights in the federal government. Another one comes in the coda to Condor, when Redford says he's told the whole sordid story to the New York Times. Here's where it gets interesting. At first, you feel that Redford has scored a victory, using the press to expose governmental corruption the same way he would as a reporter in All the President's Men. But then the CIA higher-up, played by Cliff Robertson, asks him, "Do you think they'll print it?" implying that the CIA has the power to squash the story. Redford reasserts that they will, but the film ends with a freeze-frame on Redford's expression definitely betraying some doubt that justice will be done. As it turns out, Pollack wanted that ambiguity, talking about the ending in this 1976 interview. Of course, in All the President's Men, the idea of the press going up against a crooked, monolithic institution was explored further, with the press coming out on top (that being said, knowing that this was real lent the film a certain sadness that so much of our government could be so corrupt).

Elsewhere in the interview, Pollack (as everyone has assumed anyway) said the Watergate scandal was a prominent subtext of Condor:

Here I tried to deal, as much as I could, with trust and suspicion, paranoia, which I think is happening in this country, when every institution I grew up believing was sacrosanct is now beginning to crumble. It’s destroying, in a very serious way, a certain kind of trust that is essential to have in a working society.

These days, that would count as an optimistic outlook on our country's leadership. Which is why so many films have come out in the last few years that have addressed issues like the war in Iraq, torture, etc. This article from The Atlantic analyzes the resurgence of this '70s-esque phenomenon. The most interesting part of the story for me was the end, in which author Ross Douthat contrasts the attitude of the country during the wars that shaped their respective eras in order to explain (and I'm simplifying a bit here) why there haven't been any real good movies about the Iraq War.

That is, in the end, the key distinction. The Vietnam War was a bipartisan fiasco that took place amid profound social disarray, and everyone was understood to be complicit—Democrats as well as Republicans, ordinary citizens as well as politicians, the soldiers on the ground as well as the Best and the Brightest shipping them overseas. The conflict in Iraq is occurring during a time of relative domestic peace, and as a result the pessimism it’s produced, though real enough, hasn’t shaken our civilizational confidence in nearly the same way.

The difference is readily apparent in our politics. The Vietnam era had riots and rallies, the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army, because the rot seemed to go so deep that only desperate measures were worth contemplating. The resistance movements of this era, by contrast, spend most of their time raising money for Democratic candidates, because it seems to many people that winning a few elections could make the nightmare go away. And what’s true for MoveOn.org is true for the entertainment industry. The popular culture of the 1970s reflected the widespread sense that only a revolution could set things right. But nobody’s going to write a 21st-century version of Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), a book about the revolutionary spirit and countercultural excesses of ’70s Hollywood stars; this generation of stars is too busy fund-raising for Hillary and Obama.
All of this suggests that the ’70s revival, though pervasive at the moment, may not have that much staying power. 

The original decade of nightmares didn’t end when the Vietnam War did; it persisted through Ford and Carter, oil shocks and stagflation, and the Iran hostage crisis. The new ’70s may go out with George W. Bush.