the reader
by Douglas Messerli
Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and David Rayfiel (screenplay, based on
a novel by James Grady), Sydney Pollack (director) Three Days of the Condor / 1975
His next step is one that should have long ago made clear that Joe
Turner and I have little in common, even though the movie tries to maintain the
myth that Turner is a kind of befuddled everyman: he kidnaps, at random, a
beautiful woman, Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway), who just happens to be a
photographer, living alone in a nice, if small, apartment, who, instead of
screaming, allows herself to be carried off.
She is just slightly sexually kinky enough to not wildly protest, later,
his tying her up. Although she finds his
story a bit unbelievable (who could believe a line that begins: “Listen, I work
for the CIA. I am not a spy. I just read books”?), she helps him ward off a
would-be murderer, and, ultimately, joins in a caper that includes a series of
tricky meetings with the local CIA head, J. Higgins (Cliff Robertson) while
Turner himself finds his way into a telephone terminal where he cleverly
splices together several lines so that when he again calls the CIA he cannot be
traced. Meeting with his murdered friends’ wife, he encounters the man behind
the murders, Joubert (Max von Sydow) and escapes by paying several children to
surround him (he pretends to have locked himself out) on his way back to the
car.
Yet this clearly clever man does not, until very late in the work, pick
up the obvious links to his question asked at the beginning of the film in
response to the mystery books published “in Dutch. A book out of Venezuela.
Mystery stories in Arabic.” Oil is the obvious connection, and once he sees the
link he also begins to perceive that the murder has been ordered by someone in
the “company,” a CIA exec, Leonard Atwood (Addison Powell). Is he a “damn good
amateur” or just a fool? Perhaps he is both, as Jourbert suggests:
Condor is an
amateur. He’s lost, unpredictable, perhaps
sentimental. He
could fool a professional. Not deliberately,
but precisely
because he is lost, doesn’t know what to do.
Turner, in short, is no “everyman,” not even a real human being, but is
a figment of the writers’ imaginations, a man who can do incredible things when
the script calls for it, and is dangerously innocent at other times. It is not
that he is simply contradictory, but that he is an illusion: a man able to
escape the most internecine machinations. A good man in an evil organization,
Turner, nonetheless, might also be described as a kidnapper, robber, rapist,
and murderer (although it is Jourbert, not he, who shoots Atwood dead)—even if
these acts have been committed out of self-defense. It is his research and
question, moreover, that has led to all of his co-worker’s deaths. He has saved
himself only by destroying several others.
Is it any wonder that by film’s end—although he has attempted to protect
himself by recounting the facts in a sealed letter to The New York Times—he is destined to become,
as Higgins suggests, “a very lonely man,” the film hinting that reading, in its
isolation from the real, is a very dangerous profession.
Los Angeles, March 7, 2013
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (March 2013).
No comments:
Post a Comment