Three Days of the Condor

It is certainly a privilege to grow old, though its pleasures are open to debate. One of them is sharing good things you discovered years ago.

Three Days of the Condor poster

I had forgotten just how good Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor is. Maybe influenced by the Kennedy assassinations, I told Miki, the Seventies saw a whole slew of paranoid thrillers: Three Days of the Condor, but also The Conversation, The Parallax View and others.

Prescient too.

— Do we have plans to invade the Middle East?
— Are you crazy?
— Am I?

— It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil, right? In 10 or 15 years — food, plutonium, and maybe even sooner. What do you think that people are going to want us to do then?
— Ask them.
— Not now. Then. Ask them when they’re running out. Ask them when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask them when their engines stop. Ask them when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. Want to know something? They won’t want us to ask them. They’ll just want us to get it for them.

Miki was puzzled. Which bit, she asked, did you think was paranoid?


Date
June 5, 2022