Three Days of The Condor - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

When first released, the film was reviewed positively by critic Vincent Canby, who wrote:

"Yet in Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor, Turner, whose code name is Condor, comes close to wreaking more havoc on the C.I.A. in three days than any number of House and Senate investigating committees have done in years...As a serious exposé of misdeeds within the C.I.A. the film is no match for stories that have appeared in your local newspaper. Indeed, one has to pay careful attention to figure out just what it is that who is doing to whom in Three Days of the Condor and, if I understood it correctly, it's never as horrifying as the real thing...The suspense of the film depends less on this kind of plausibility than on Mr. Redford's reputation (in a movie we accept the fact that he can do anything) and on the verve with which Mr. Pollack, the director, sets everything up. It also benefits from the presence of good actors, including Faye Dunaway (as the woman who befriends the fleeing Turner), Cliff Robertson, Max Von Sydow, and John Houseman..."

The late French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, makes mention of the film as an example of a new genre of "retro cinema" in his essay on history in the now foundational text, Simulacra and Simulation (1981):

"In the 'real' as in cinema, there was history but there isn't any anymore. Today, the history that is 'given back' to us (precisely because it was taken from us) has no more of a relation to a 'historical real' than neofiguration in painting does to the classical figuration of the real...All, but not only, those historical films whose very perfection is disquieting: Chinatown, Three Days of the Condor, Barry Lyndon, 1900, All the President's Men, etc. One has the impression of it being a question of perfect remakes, of extraordinary montages that emerge more from a combinatory culture (or McLuhanesque mosaic), of large photo-, kino-, historicosynthesis machines, etc., rather than one of veritable films."