THIRTY YEARS AGO, SYDNEY Pollack made Three Days of the Condor, a complicated thriller about a conspiracy inside the Central Intelligence Agency that unravels because of an unanticipated slip-up. An innocent CIA employee played by Robert Redford is out of the office--a Manhattan townhouse in which he and his colleagues do nothing but read books and newspapers in an effort to collect what is now called "open source intelligence"--getting coffee when everybody he works with is assassinated. The conspirators decide to pin the crime on Redford, who must work to stay ahead of the assassins and try to figure out what happened so that he can clear his name and save his life.
Three Days of the Condor is dated in many ways--from its CIA-is-the-root-of-all-evil plotline to its worshipful...