Hacker Cinema
Three Days of the Condor
1975 · Film · 117 min
Directed by Sydney Pollack
When bookish CIA researcher Joe Turner finds all his co-workers dead, he, together with a woman he has kidnapped, must work together to outwit those responsible until he determines who he can really trust.
8 positive1 negative14 neutralfrom 23 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
23 comments on Hacker News
Fully agree - such a great movie: absolutely flowing, entertaining, fantastic characters, nice colors. That together with "Three days of the Condor" is what I immediately though of when I heard the news, but so far only one of the newspapers/sites I read has mentioned both of them..., weird :o| Am I just getting too old (respectively, are articles being written by too junior people?)?
If you like RR and spy films then definitely check “Three Days of the Condor”
I remember re-watching “three days of the condor” recently - and apart from a few “wow the 70s was a different time” moments the biggest takeaway was the hero just hands a dossier to the Washington Post, no drops off a dossier to the post room!, and the film, the audience, everyone just assumes the job is done - the bad guys are exposed and they will be punished
I think we have a different view now. In the UK we are looking at a Post Office scandal where the upper management literally prosecuted its own employees for theft instead of admit a billion dollar computer system was buggy. And this started in 1990s, was printed in newspapers by the mid-2000s and only got serious last year and prosecutions will probably go through to the 2030s
I mean if the punishment for your misdeeds is thirty years delayed, and basically consists of retiring and being embarrassed in front of friends it’s hardly a punishment.
And it rather makes this “moles” efforts … well it’s not much of a deal for him is it really.
Is this now worse or better? It seems like there were tons on 1970s films that had a sex subplot awkwardly crammed in. For example, the ridiculous and seemingly endless sex scene in "Three Days of the Condor", an otherwise fairly tight 1974 spy film.
PDP-8 computers have appeared in several movies, starting with Three Days of the Condor in 1975. Starring the Computer has a complete list. [1]
[1] https://www.starringthecomputer.com/computers.html#DEC
If I'm not mistaken, though, irc still works pretty well, and still provides what it always has, and could still function as the live chat aspect of a small community's technology stack. Moreover, in the event that the high-availability internet goes away, it will probably still work on a 90s-tech internet. If your packets are just conversational text, you really don't need a massive warp-speed pipe to make it work.
Likewise Usenet - yes, we abused it to get our alt.binaries (read: boobies), but that was strictly desperation. It still works fine on the fast internet, but again, will continue to work on a 90s internet, in the event that we lose the fast one.
Fast itself is really what's warping our perceptions of what is normal and acceptable. When was the last time you watched an old Connery Bond movie? My grandpa took me to see every Bond movie that existed at the time back in the 80s, the downtown cineplex threw a festival. I remember enjoying all of them at the time, nothing wrong with em.
I threw on Dr No a couple months ago and I swear, I could not get past about 30 minutes, the pacing was hellishly slow, to the point that wanted to climb into the screen and lob a bomb at his car myself out of sheer boredom. Had a similar experience trying to watch Three Days of the Condor.
Interestingly, I decided to rewatch the Lone Wolf and Cub movies after watching the Mandalorian, and they were just as fun as I remember. Some slow scenes, but good pacing with a decent body count:frame ratio.
I don't think we're so much yelling at clouds as wishing the clouds would slow down long enough for us to yell at em. I have my doubts that the pace can be maintained indefinitely, and they are not trying to bring it under control at all. What I expect next is a painful correction in which the laws of nature will come into play in a big way. Whee!
I watched both sneakers and three days of the condor recently. Sneakers is an OK Hollywood movie but I fail to see the reverence it has. The technical details of the physical security systems are nonsense.
Condor is a better movie. It still suffers a bit around the Condor Cathy relationship.
While Sneakers is make believe, condor resonates today. The speech about oil is pretty spot on. The whole idea of releasing to the papers is a movie trope, but the antagonist casts doubt, “will they publish the story” We know today that the press is a propaganda arm of the government and the answer is probably no. They will not publish the story.
> It’s also not difficult to imagine Bishop as an older version of the more principled protagonists he played in Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men.
That's a fun idea. If only the movie ran for just a bit longer and mega-casual assassin Max Von Sydow and spooky garage conversation informant Hal Holbrook could've been in on things somehow.
"You've got to follow...the macguffin!"
(Also this clock tower thing...yeah I admit I never noticed, loved the van and mustache though)
A fun read, thanks op!
Reminds me of the ending of Three days of the Condor. A great film, while it doesn't touch on the exact issue happening today w/ Russia, the ending has quite an emotional tinge about the ends justifying the means.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZNnDiDSUiI
Just the other day I was watching the classic Sydney Pollack thriller "The three days of the Condor", with Robert Redford, and I was thinking they treated NY phone lines as extremely accessible. At one point, Condor somehow gains access to an exchange to make a call to his opponents, and proceeds to make his line appear like coming from dozens of different addresses, all with a simple tape recorder.
(it's also funny how in that movie Redford is supposed to be a hippie ubergeek forced to turn into an action hero - when he's clearly coolness personified)
Better than even WarGames, The Matrix or Blackhat? Better than Swordfish or Live Free or Die Hard? Hackers even?
I always considered Sneakers a spy movie rather than a hacker movie, properly sandwiched in a triple-feature between Three Days of the Condor and Spy Game.
The technology was not very fanciful if at all. If you think that movie was ahead of its time in terms of exhibiting what was possible, then might I suggest Three Days of the Condor (1975), and of course the ever popular Sneakers (1992). The former is far more fascinating given its age, although I suspect less so for someone who was in the middle of their computer science/computer engineering/signals intelligence/cryptanalysis career during that era.
The things that governments are capable of doing are rarely secret. They leak out over time, and you'll see them portrayed in niche culture long before they become undeniable public knowledge. For example, off the top of my head, the satellite photos published amidst the 1998 missile strike of the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_pharmaceutical_factory) are the types of evidence that inform the private sector, including authors and screenwriters. I'm sure similar photos and descriptions were publicly available much earlier than that, so the generic ability to track people on rooftops via satellite (notwithstanding all the little gotchas that aren't fit for storytelling) was more than plausible at that point, especially considering that then as now the military doesn't typically release material that discloses their best capabilities.
I used to have a link to a pre-9/11, accidental admission in a magazine interview by a general about the Navy's ability to tap undersea fiber optic cables. Though at that point I think it was already assumed the U.S. performed such missions--certainly by Russia and China, but even among intelligence geeks--which is probably why he didn't think much of the comment. (IIRC, the topic was a submarine designed for tapping undersea cable, though at that time it was only "public knowledge" that it could tap traditional copper cables, not fiber optic. He impliedly--only barely shy of explicitly--admitted that it also tapped fiber optic cables.)
What's fanciful is the degree and extent of corruption assumed in these narratives. People seem to think it's more plausible simply because of the true-to-life character of the technological portrayals. But NEVER forget that the principal aim of movies is to elicit strong emotions by leveraging common fears[1] and desires, suspending disbelief by deftly mixing fiction with non-fiction. And I don't mean to preach; it's definitely a life-long struggle for everyone to differentiate culturally constructed narratives from reality.
[1] E.g. Big Brother, the particularized fear of powerlessness that comes when mixing it with political cynicism.
Watch "Three Days of the Condor" if only for the scenes with DEC PDP hardware. That's the way we used to do it kids.
Max was also great in this movie - I would not want that guy coming after me. RIP after an exceptional career in films.
This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order; character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each character, common names are given in rough order of popularity, followed by names that are reported but rarely seen; official ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: <>. Square brackets mark the particularly silly names introduced by INTERCAL.
# Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; crunch ; hex; [mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe; flash; <square>, pig-pen; tictactoe; scratchmark; thud; thump; splat.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/ASCII.html
So, according to the above, the most common name for # is “number sign”, and the officiall ANSI/CCITT term is “square”.
Also, in the 1975 movie Three Days of the Condor, the term “symbol for number” is used, presumably referring to #.
This is actually part of the plot of the movie (Three Days of the Condor) and book (Six days of the Condor). The protagonist works at a CIA site where they read basically everything released and break down the plots to see if it has any strategic value and/or state secrets.
If I had to guess, this still goes on at the state level, but this article is about making this sort of data (minus the state secrets awareness) available to the corporations able to afford it.
I'd also say that I think this might be an amusing reversal of the old mantra: Ideas have no intrinsic value. This business is pretty much about the expression of ideas. Maybe they have value because they are writing them down and marketing them.
Jeez, some of those movies are dreadful, and there's almost nothing on the list from before 1990.
1954 - Gog (robots that look like robots and not people in metal suits)
1957 - Desk Set (non-stupid treadment of an early computer)
1970 - Colossus : The Forbin Project (how is this not in there)
1971 - How to Frame a Figg (silly, but it's got a computer hacker)
1975 - Three Days of the Condor
1990 - The KGB, the Computer, and Me (PBS doc about "The Cuckoo's Egg")
My favorite movies, but for no particuliar reason:
Platoon
Wall street
Three days of the condor
Chinatown
Sunset Boulevard
The Stranger(actually all of Orson Wells movies)
Any Andy Griffith episode
Bicycle thieves 1948
Niagara
Double indemnity (actually most billy wilder films)
The Misfits (last film for Marilyn and Rhett Butler--forgot his name.)
Giant
Rebal without a cause
Leaving Las Vegas
Blow out (all three)
Saturday night fever
Yes, even Urban Cowboy
One flew over the cocos nest
Deliverance
Hanna and her sisters
East of Eden
Dr. Strange love
Back to the future
Jaws
In cold blood(with Robert Blake)
In cold blood (with Eric Roberts, and forget his name)
The asphalt jungle 1948?
All about eve
The hot rock
Little Haus Big Halsey (Redford said it was his worst movie. Yes, it's masagonistic. Yes, he plays a jerk. But the movie captures the 70's I recall as a kid. The filming is great. His side kick in the movie did a great job playing a sweet, innocent, country teen.)
A lot of foreign films I have yet to see.
"Three Days of the Condor" used to make the list too, because it was alleged to be one of Mitnick's favorite movies.
Well here's a weird example. Last night I watched the movie Three Days of the Condor, which has a character named Joubert. And here we have a post on the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon by a poster named joubert. Welp.
Not also how all of those are fantasy movies for kids and adult geeks. No Raging Bull or American Grafitti or Apocalypse Now or Three Days of The Condor, etc etc.
You already had the best (Primer) After that, in no particular order:
Sneakers. Brilliant film.
Hackers - I think it's old enough now to be allowed but it was really laughable at the time - in the kind of way swordfish will be almost respected 20 years from now.
Wargames is the Hackers of the early 80s.
Pirates of Silicon Valley is also worth a watch.
Three Days of the Condor is a fantastic film if you're even slightly old school.
The nines is one of those films you'll either get and love or won't - I loved it.
Battle Royale is an amazing film that happens to have some hacking in it.
2001 is the ultimate hacker film, even though there's not much that you could associate hacking with it. The way it's put together, the dedication to realism, the way the special effects were implemented a year before man went to the moon defines it as a hacker film for me, although YMMV.
Not all are hacker movies per se, but these have great general geek appeal:
Existenz http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/
Cube http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/
The Nines http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0810988/
The World's Fastest Indian http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0412080/
October Sky http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0132477/
Three Days of the Condor http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0073802/
'... burglar, a spy, a fugitive, a delinquent, a hacker, and a piano teacher ...'
CONDOR IN SNEAKERS: Staring & directed by Robert Redford as Bishop. Who leads a team of smart hackers who first work out the what, "make things people want" then ruthlessly executes the how. All the time, incremently adjusting the what. The focus, just work on making "black box" the best in the world and getting as many customers as possible. At the same time, outsmarting those who seek to take a shortcuts in hard road to startup success.
BISHOP: "Well here we have it gang. We know the deal, build the 'black box', release it early, incremental improvements and build up the customers."
MOTHER: "Come on 'Bishop' that theory has been well and truly debunked. Just last week in my latest edition of Conspiracy Theory, you know the Marketing edition. It says in black and white, 'the only way to get recognised' is a quick word to Crunch and your gold!."
WHISTLER: "Did you mean 'Capitan Crunch'? Did you know Crunch did prototype work for Apple ][ telephony hardware, but Jobs got it canned."
BISHOP: "No he means the 'Silicon Alley' of the Noughties. TechCrunch is a waste of time. Look these guys can't even scale their website, they don't listen to their customers. When the advertising falls they are history."
MOTHER: "You mean I've been reading this Marketing edition and it's not true? But they have influence right? Just one email to the editor, then BAMMM. Instant recognition. I simply don't believe you."
CREASE; "It wasn't Jobs, 'Whistler'. It was Gates. Don't worry we settled that one siphoning off his fortune to charity and planting logic bombs in Windows Vista. You don't think he's quiting Microsoft for the love of giving money away do you?"
BISHOP: "Crease enough pranks. Carl hows the new features going? Whistler whats the growth rate this week? Mother come, lets have a quick chat on your sources of information"
Some quick refs ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(movie)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Days_of_the_Condor