Three Days of the Condor is commonly cited as one of the best spy films ever made. I watched on a flight back from Germany, and I’ll concede that it’s very, very good.
Robert Redford plays Joe Turner. He works for the CIA in New York under the cover of a “literary historical society” that reads books all day, and feeds them into a computer to determine trends and possible terrorist plots.
One day, he goes out to pick up lunch, and when he comes back, everyone has been shot dead. From then on, he’s on the run, trying to figure out why. He abducts Faye Dunaway’s character to get out of a tough spot, and she becomes an accomplice and lover along the way.
In classic spy fashion, Turner has no idea who he can trust, and no idea if his former employees are actually trying to kill him. He gets double-crossed a few times, and racks his brain to put together the pieces of what he was working on that might have threatened the wrong person.
The ending is quite good, with Turner thinking that he’s found a clean way out, but the last scene and dialog making you wonder if he’s just kidding himself and the apparatus that set him up might still be able to take him down.
It’s adapted from a novel published the year before (interestingly called Six Days of the Condor). There was also a 2018 TV series that ran for two seasons and 20 episodes.