Sydney Pollack month: Three Days of the Condor

A retrospective by Brooks Rich

Doing some cleanup for the first week fo February for Sydney Pollack month. Just hitting films I want to make sure are covered. A good underrate gem on Friday. Today we have one of Pollack's best. There is something called the paranoia trilogy from the seventies. Director Alan J. Pakula made three different films about the US government doing shady stuff and that everyone is out to get you. It is. trilogy of films not to watch in one sitting. The films were Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President's Men. I think an honorary member of that club should be Sydney Pollack's 1975 film, Three Days of the Condor.

Robert Redford is Condor, a lowly CIA analyst who comes back from getting lunch to find his co-workers murdered. When he is nearly killed during an extraction attempt by the CIA, he goes on the run, trying to piece together what happened. It is a tight and paranoid ride where nothing is what it seems and we as an audience have no idea who to trust.

Condor is a great role for Redford as he is such a good everyman and to see him be kind of corrupted by the whole situation. We are rooting for Redford and we're with hm, even as he does some less than reputable things. Pollack always has really good character development in his stories. This is one of his best. If you had never seen Three Days of the Condor, fix that immediately.

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

A retrospective by Brooks Rich Let's kick off the spooky season with a bona fide classic. I love the horror genre, but not much really scares or creeps me out. Most horror films I just watch and enjoy. However, 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' is one of those that really gets under my skin, and not just because the Sawyer family are eating people. The way Tobe Hooper shoots the film gives it an almost documentary feel. If you have never seen 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre,' you should probably fix that immediately. Do I need to explain what it's about? A group of '70s kids is driving across Texas in a van and runs afoul of the Sawyer family, including the man himself, Leatherface. It's a classic of the horror genre and one of the pioneers of the '70s and '80s horror boom. The film has a reputation for being sickeningly bloody and violent, but that is not true. It's essentially a bloodless film, which makes it even more horrifying. Most of the violence...

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