Top Ten CIA Movies

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

"I'm not a field agent, I just read books!" As directed by Sydney Pollack and starring his long-time collaborator Robert Redford (the two did seven films together), Condor is a fine piece of mid-70's paranoia. A bookish CIA officer operating out of the New York-based "American Literary Historical Society," Joe Turner's job is to read lots and make connections. He goes out to pick up sandwiches for his co-workers, comes back to find everyone blown away, goes on the run, hijacks Faye Dunaway and the pair have soft-lit 70's sex. Max von Sydow tries to kill him, but he's too old. It's all very 70's, as evidenced by the jazz-funk stylings of the title sequence. Which makes sense, for between this, The Parallax View, All the President's Men, and The Conversation, that decade almost perfected the paranoid thriller genre.

From the TIME archives, our 1975 review of Three Days of the Condor

From the TIME archives, Robert Redford's tribute to director Sydney Pollack