In a book that has never lost its timeliness since it was published in 1964, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, the eminent historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the use of fear as a political instrument—the paranoid style in question—would be of no consequence were it “applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds.” Instead, it has become a commonplace, as anyone who observed the recent U.S. election cycle will recognize. Adds Hofstadter, “It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”
True enough. But it’s true, too, that, as some wise person once noted, even paranoiacs have enemies. That is one lesson to draw from a film that perfectly captures the scary feel of America in the waning days of the presidency of Richard Nixon, a creepy era indeed, though, considering the presidents Nixon’s party has fielded since, one worthy of nostalgia today. That film is Three Days of the Condor, a 1975 thriller directed by Sidney Pollack. A smart and agile Robert Redford, then at his apex as both actor and star, plays the lead character, an intelligence analyst code-named Condor who is swept up in events beyond his ken or pay grade; as he tells a CIA operative, “I’m not a field agent. I just read books!” Reading books, then as now, can get a person killed, and someone within the government sorely wants Condor dead, so potent are the things he carries around in his brain, things that can reveal the existence of … well, you’ll just have to watch.
Aided by a pensive Faye Dunaway, hunted by a killer played with chilling ordinariness by Max Von Sydow, and “handled” by banally evil bureaucrats portrayed by John Houseman and Cliff Robertson, Condor makes his way through a maze of obstacles to safety. But is it really safe, to borrow from another paranoid period piece, The Marathon Man? That remains an open question, punctuated by what just might be the scariest use of a Christmas carol in movie history.
