Kill James Bond! - S2E3.5: Three Days of the Condor [UNLOCKED]

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

This is an unlocked bonus episode! You can find it, and many like it, on our reasonably-priced Patreon! This week, what if there was a man who dressed so fly that the CIA wanted him dead? What if you could defeat the CIA by carjacking a hot enough woman? What if you read enough books that you stumbled upon something important? Three Days of the Condor is a movie that asks and answers all of these questions, and we have brought on our producer and true 4th mic, Nate Bethea, to discuss it. We got our wonderful producer Nate on this one, you can find him on bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/inthesedeserts.bsky.social and follow his podcast Hell of a Way to Die, a leftist military podcast by and for veterans at https://www.twitter.com/hellofaway ----- Friend of the show Bella, a refugee evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021, is raising money for her gender confirmation surgery! Anything you can give would be hugely appreciated! https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/team-bella ----- Check out friend of the show Mattie's new book Simplicity here, or wherever fine graphic novels are sold! ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. In our home, we talk a lot about how insane everything feels, and agonise constantly over what can be done to best help the Palestinians trapped in Gaza facing the full brunt of genocidal violence. My partner Rebecca has put together a list of four fundraisers you can contribute to- all of them are at work on the ground doing what they can. -Palestinian Communist Youth Union, which is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestine https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity -Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotilla https://www.waterislifegaza.org/ -Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla also https://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848 -Thamra, which distributes herb and veg seedlings, repairs and maintains water infrastructure, and distributes food made with replanted veg patches https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-thamra-cultivating-resilience-in-gaza ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com , as well as on our Bluesky and X.com the every app account

Nihama, baby girl. It's me, Devon. I'm back in the UK. But unfortunately, I've not been back in the UK for long enough for us to have recorded and edited an episode of the podcast, Kill James Bond. So today you're getting a bonus unlock. This is a bonus from all the way back in season two. This is Three Days of the Condor. We're unlocking this because Robert Redford, the star of this, has recently passed away. I think the phrase one of the good ones is thrown around a lot these days but he really was one of the good ones also on this episode is our editor Nate he's the fourth guy in the picture we get a lot of messages that are like basically who's the fourth guy in the picture it's this guy it's Nate it's this fella

all right enjoy and I will see you next week for the bonus episode which is of course signs you think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth Hello and welcome to another episode of Kill James Bond. I am Alice Gortar Kelly and I am joined by the full cast, the full compliment of our podcast today because we've got Abigail Thorne, we've got Devon and we've got Nate Bithay. How's it going, Nate? It's going very well. Thank you for having me on. It's always an interesting experience because I normally listen to this, you know, post.

It's been recorded. And so I'm just sort of like, ooh, I'm on a real recording. I can change the direction of his episode. I can really fuck it up and derail it. So, yeah, always exciting. Yeah. And we made us all watch three days of the condo. Uh, in 1970s, sort of classic of that genre.

It's got Robert Redford in it. It's a conspiracy film, right? It's a the United States government is controlling everything that's using it to do evil sort of film, and it's pursuing... It's using it to pay YouTube as what? Yeah, exactly. And it's pursuing one guy against the system, right? We love those kinds of movies. We've talked about stuff that's inspired by them.

I saw a tweet years ago where a guy said that Three Days of the Condor is a movie about a man who dresses so fly, the CIA wants him dead. That's literally true That is very true I would also say that It's a movie about how you can defeat the CIA Single-Handedly as long as you Carjack the hottest woman you've ever seen That's true

And it's also a film about what if the CIA Had a succession of smaller CIAs within it That were Don't think that I don't have a drop For that particular line Maybe there's another CIA Inside the CIA Maybe there's a little

miniature CIA inside that CIA. Maybe there's a society within society. Like a Matrushka CIA, yeah. Yeah. What if there's like one really small CIA that doesn't come apart and that's the real CIA and that's just surrounded by a bunch of other CIA. Just fake hollow

CIAs. I have to say though, I'm not a lifelong New Yorker but I lived in New York City for four years and spent a lot of time there for various reasons in the years prior. So anything that captures bad old New York is always a delight to me.

There's some real early 70s New York in this. Yes, there is. There really is. There's a bit where he gets almost run down by a cab, and the guy puts his head out the window and goes... What the hell you're going, man? Do you sleep at night, will you? Perfect.

It's perfect. Absolutely no notch. But so we begin in a sort of quite collegiate intelligence agency. Yeah, the CIA turns out really chill place to work. Like, it's, it's something that I think, um, it's a feature of some of the Jack Ryan books, too, is that like, at some point in the intelligence services, you need just a sort of bunch of very tweedy guys who wear sweaters who read a lot, um, who, who, who, who don't do the Jason Bourne stuff and instead just spend a lot of time reading novels. And so I have, I have an anecdote about this that, uh, I could leave to everyone's discretion as to whether or not it's, it's, it's two, uh, army meathead to be left. in a regular episode, but I do feel like it's very much up our alley as a show, which is a friend of mine who's now a special forces officer. At one point was on a special, like, detachment mission to work for the Ranger Regiment on one of their deployments, Afghanistan. So he was working in

their Joint Operations Center. And he said that about 75% of the people in those, what they call a jock, the JOC, are, you know, defense intelligence agency, CIA, other agents. agencies, et cetera, civilians, you know, sort of like working in the whatever intelligence gathering things. And he says that the Ranger guys have a nickname for these people. And I mean, obviously it's a subset, but it just applies to all of them. They call them wall walkers because they're so autistic that they have to follow the perimeter of the wall to walk anywhere that they're going. And so like if I were just going, basically everything that the special operations command across all of the U.S. military has done since 2001 has more or less been powered by autism.

And I just felt like that was something that was worth including. Yeah. And he works for the Autism Intelligence Agency. Oh, 100% percent. Yeah. In the same way that Jack Ryan, like, theoretically teaches at the Naval Academy at Annapolis and then incidentally gets drawn into shit, but he still gets to preserve this sort of Donnish affect.

Robert Redford works for, I think it's called, like, the American Historical Literary Society. That's right. And what they do is sort of open source intelligence, is the way he describes it's later on is they read everything that gets published. They read novels, they read journals, they read like cheap spy thrillers,

and they plug it all into a big computer, and the computer tells them whether or not it is ripping off something the CIA actually does, so they know if the CIA is leaking. That's a cool idea, but also, like, we see that he gets his own office and, like, he comes to work in jeans. It looks like such a nice place to work, genuinely.

His girlfriend works there, and, like, it just seems like a very relaxed atmosphere. Yeah, what's funny is we get like a solid 10 minutes, which doesn't seem like a lot of time, but it does a lot of work, introducing just the people he works with his office, he's late coming in, and when we introduce him, the first shot of Robert Redford is him wearing a sort of a beanie hat, like Boris Johnson wears one, riding a 1970s e-bike in New York City traffic. Yeah, riding north on Park Avenue, like the 77th Street, where they have this town,

house, you know, converted into an office, basically looking like me in traffic. But it's like a moped. I don't even think it's, if it's an e-bike, that's amazing. But yeah, he's, he's riding a moped amid a sea of, like, gigantic 70s boat cars. And it's just sort of establishing that he's a, he's a renegade. He's an outsider. He's, uh, he does things his own way. He, he marches to the tune of a different drummer. That's right. To include when he goes to, uh, to get lunch in a faithful, the world's most fateful lunch order. Yeah. His boss hands him some report and then sends him out to get lunch in the rain, and he sneaks out the back, which makes their ex-military security guard very mad because it's unauthorized.

And we see that the building is being watched by somebody in a car who is crossing off names on a list as they enter and leave. So they don't see him leave as a point. But they see him come in, and they cross his name off the list, and the surveillance glamour shot returns. I don't remember what movie did this last, but having a photo of someone that's meant to be a surveillance photo, but because it's an actor, you just have like a five-by-five glossy of Robert Redford. It looks like he should have signed it, and they just tick him off the list, and it's like, yep, Robert Redford is in the building. The other thing that I like about this is this sequence sort of really makes a sort of quietly a big deal of the sort of access control of this building. You have to get buzzed in as a camera, as a security guard, and we see that the woman. by the desk has a panic button, and she has a 45 automatic, just in her desk draw.

And, like, throughout this scene, people are constantly going in and out, and opening the door and answering it for mail and stuff for different reasons. And it's always, like, a slight hassle. Like, I think Robert Redford goes to check on his moped because some teens are trying to steal the wheels off of it or something. I fucking adore the first, like, half hour of this movie so much. And the first 10 minutes where it takes so much time and care, like, set up. up this ensemble cast.

Everyone's in there. They've all got their own little foibles. There are people who get like one line, but they're treated as if they'll have the entire rest of the movie. And it's really, really good in setting up that this is just... Redford's just gone to work today. And it's just so happens that some of his habits have completely saved him. Like when he goes out to get lunch through a back entrance because it's raining

and someone's comments that he always does that when it's raining. it's really good There's a nice little detail as well which is that Robert Redford has been reading a bunch of mystery novels or something that have been translated into a weird assortment of languages And anyway he's compiled this report that says Yeah Arabic but not Russian

At one point he just I don't know why I pulled this to drop but Dutch But not He's compiled this report that's like Hey I reckon some weird shit might be happening And he's passed it on up the chain to his supervisor And then he gets it back

And they're like, no, they don't think it's anything, like, so just forget about it, right? Yeah, like anything to make kind of thing. And we see outside some more of the surveillance team assemble. There's a guy wearing a big rain poncho who kind of looks like me. There's a male man. And then there's also a guy who I will be referring to temporarily as Mr. Euro vibes. And, yeah, it's fucking Max von Svidal walks in the Viss shot. And I'm like, there he is, baby.

There's the leader of high-throth. And he's looking great in this movie. Like, we're gonna sort of talk a lot about Robert Redford's fits, which are incredible. But to me, Max von Siddell's fits in this, are great, he's wearing, he's dressed exactly like the hostage takers and the taking of Pelham, one, two, three. 100%. A hundred percent, yeah. He's kind of the same character even, because there's this, like, 70s American fascination

with, and repulsion of European mercenary. That's who the guys in Pelham, one, two, three are. That's who he is. He's wearing this sort of like hounds tooth sport coat and a trilby through, like an alpine hat through most of the movies. He's got like a very sort of trimmed mustache. And you see him watching the street and the first big indication that something is seriously amiss here is he signals for them to like go in by like spearing his umbrella into a trash can. So it's just standing up.

And it looks weird as hell, and you're just like, oh, something is about to happen here. So Robert Radford, he goes to get lunch. There's lots of great little fucking New York City lines. It's really, really good. He's sort of, his cover, he's masquerading as like a sort of a failed writer. And the guy at the deli tries to cheer him up. And he says, I always wanted to be a scoffia. Which is great.

It's just, he always wanted to be a scoffia. They're like the famous chef and he's like working at a sandwich counter and it's just it's such a perfect little like yeah they have this long interaction between the two of them where he's just like well to be fair like you know never uh because i never painted a painting till whatever like but then again you know Mozart started composing very young and the dude next to him who's also an extremely New York guy listens to most of us and goes what is this the New York public library what's going on you it's yeah it's and it all feels so much Mets, baby, love to bets. He's just like, yeah, I come here like everybody else to get sick. And the guy's like, hey, whoa, what's talking about? Come on. It sells instantly, like, Robert Redford has done this most days for, like, the past however many years. But the thing I would say, too, is that, so something that may not come across is that

that aspect of New York City is very much dying out if hasn't already died out. And if you watch films like The Taking Appellum 1, 2, 3, this film, this film, film, the French connection, to some extent, taxi driver, although taxi driver very much was trying to make New York into the sort of like, you know, the, the hell world, yeah, hell world jungle of decay, a little bit, even a little bit the Warriors, too, just because it was filmed on location, some Woody Allen shit, like, let's be honest, Manhattan or Annie Hall, like, you get this glimpse of what it was, that sort of where Archie Bunker and the cast of taxi were real people. and like these lunch counter diners, like corner lot restaurants, those don't really exist

anymore. Like some of them are still around, but so many of them have either been turned into like Dwayne Reed's, which is a chain pharmacy or bank branches or Starbucks because, you know, the landlords could get so much more money for rent and neighborhood demographics have changed. And it's like, so you can still find some of these places here and there. They're rare, and a lot of the times they're owned by people who are very, very elderly at this point, but they are still kind of there. But when you watch this stuff, it's just full on, if you're like a bad old New York aficionado like I am, it's a full on just fucking like firehose of, I guess what you could call imagined nostalgia. So for me, even some of those accents don't exist anymore. Well, no, I mean, like half of the people at the American Historical Literary Society or whatever have mid-Atlantic accents.

Yeah, they all sound like William F. Buckley. The genuinely, they said, I kept thinking to my, I kept thinking of myself, listening as I was just like, damn, I didn't realize that so many fucking British people had ascended to the upper echelon of the CIA. Are they not British? I thought they were. No, no, they're the kind of like hyper posh American where you end up sounding sort of quite British. That doesn't exist anymore, really, but it did back in those days. People who would have been in their 50s and 60s back in those days would have had that sort of like Nickerbocker, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. about, yeah, what we called

Mid-Atlantic accent. William F. Buckley was one of those people, like, basically, if you were super fancy, you, like, your governor, governesses and stuff, your nannies were British, and you went to Europe in the summer. And so, like...

I'm just now realizing why there's a character in an anime I watched as a child who was a princess who had that accent, and that's what it's a reference to. Okay, thank you. I now understand Tenchi, Muya, Riooki. It's just a very ab-a-go sentence. Well, but I feel like

the most famous incarnation of this would be like, imagine a normal American saying, we have nothing to fair but fair itself. Like, that's not a normal way of talking. Yeah. That was, that was Frank Cundellano Roosevelt's normal speaking voice

because he was from that, like, super upper echelon of New York society that did, like, you know, took a fucking boat to Europe every summer to, like, go to beer its or whatever. And, like, they had that accent. And similarly, like you were saying, Alice, some of these, like, super niche Manhattan accents

don't really exist anymore. like Robert Caro does a audiobook for I think he did one for the power broker and his book about Lyndon Johnson and his his accent is fully like vestigial

Manhattan white guy accent that just doesn't exist anymore and it's really genuinely like it has a sort of like nostalgia effect for me because like here and there you'll encounter old people that talk this way but it's it's pretty much gone now yeah it seems nice it's nice that Manhattan is that rather than just like dog walkers,

which is the only people who, like, are there now. But anyway, the bad thing about it is that Max von Siddhar murders everyone. He does. He comes in and with a silenced Mac 10, they shoot everybody, including Robert Redford's office girlfriend Janice. We didn't really talk about Janice, but he is also incidentally a bit racist to her.

Because she is Chinese. He asks her what, like, a Hanji means, and it's 10. And he asks her if she's sure, and she goes, like, look at my implied Chinese face. Would I be wrong about this? And he goes, well, it's a nice face, but you've never been to China, which is... Yeah, I don't know. Dude! Also, those are his last words to her.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so Max wants to go and his guys kill everybody. As you say, very uncentimentally. Yeah. The only one that they don't actually show is them killing Janus, but she gets a sort of moment of bravery, where she's like sort of resigned to it. We get that 70 stageblood too, which is really bright red. It looks like Raspberry Jam. It's good fun. And so Robert Redwood comes back with the lunch order to find that everyone has been murdered in his absence.

They didn't like check for him. He's like, oh, cool. I got six free lunches. Yeah, he sits there on the desk eating six sandwiches. That's the champion's breakfast man If you're about to fight the CIA Six sandwich Of basically identical composition That's what you want

So the movie really fucking takes its time With this scene as well Which And I hugely appreciate Like there's again There's no music He just like Goes through the house

And finds everyone that he works with Completely dead as fuck And like His first reaction is disbelief too Yeah He thinks there's a joke happening at the start and then slowly realizes and you see the dread and he's like hugging all of the walls like he's really slowly progressing through the building

and it's the only sound is the fucking machine the transcribing machine whirring machine whirring yeah that's great beautiful Robert Redford's a great actor too absolutely I'm gonna stop praising this movie in about 25 minutes just get you feel he takes the 1911 and he runs and we get This is where he almost gets hit by the cab, and the guy goes, hey, you're walking here. Because he's traumatized, and he sees everyone is suspicious and threatening, like a woman sort of walking a pram. He's like, holy shit. And this is really, it's cool.

It's really well done. Really well done. And so he runs to a phone booth where he calls a guy who's, he's called the major in the credits, but one of the titles he gives himself is the panic officer, which is a fantastic job. You ring him up and you're like, help. which is what he does he goes yeah shit my entire section's been hit I'm the only survivor to which the major's like I'm not

I'm not crazy this is this is the sample that is used in the radio head song fitter happier on the album okay computer this is the panic office god yeah it is that dawned on me watching this because I have listened to that album since it came out

when I was 13 years old and I never caught the reference and back in those days would have been pretty challenging to figure out where it was from and I just never bothered to look it up but the instant he said that I was like oh my god that's that's the panic officer

you were doing Sir Leo de Capri you're pointing at the screen you're like I'm a creep what the hell am I doing here anyway the rubber redfish is like I'm not a field agent I'm just a nerd I read books my code name is

my code name is condor by the way because the guy sick the guy repriments him the guy repriments him for like calling on a pay phone and, like, not following proper communication procedures. At one point, he says, are you damaged? Which, for me, is a little on the nose as a, like, a sort of uncaring CIA.

Yeah, they say we can give you an appointment in six months, maybe, the way it lists are really long. Yeah, do you think of yourself as a CIA officer when you jerk off? They tell him, don't go home and call us back in two hours, because they're presumably they're on lunch as well. Yeah, what I really enjoy is the... And there's only like a very short shot of him doing this, but he gets so stressed after this that he goes to an art gallery. That's where he just goes to the Guggenheim. He just swings through the fucking Guggenheim.

Which he's got to kill two hours in the Rattan. I've done this too. Yeah, he just is once around. He tries going home, even though they told him not to. He does. And his landlady tells him, oh, hey, your friends are here from the CIA to kill you. He's like, oh, your two friends are here. They said you'd be home early.

I let him in ahead of you. And he's like, all right. So he goes to... What I like about this is that this is sort of clearly a conscious decision here to make it seem like Robert Redford is traumatized and crazy, and the CIA are trying to like negotiate him back home safely. Yes. Because this whole time you see the CIA like working its way through the phone call, sending

guys to investigate and clean up the historical society. They all talk really fucking weird too. that's also a choice like we get introduced to a sort of a recurring what Higgins yes who answers his phone with this fucking sentence

Higgins deputy director I'm holding the baby go ahead they all fucking talk like this there's a scene later on where like someone rings up Joubert the fucking Eastern Euro Mr Euro vibes yeah Mr Eurovives

and says a sentence and he has to just continue riffing in like pretend code metaphor, which is really fucking good. It's like, it's something like I heard you delivered a package today, and he's like, no, I had to leave a sorry you were outslip. Yeah, he's like, it has not yet been signed for or some shit like that. The Royal Mail is on strike. Like, it's getting like more and more convoluted so that I want. By the way, did any of you spot who the actor playing Higgins is?

It looks like Bert Reynolds a bit, but it's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's Uncle Ben. It's Uncle Ben. It's Uncle Ben. It's Spider-Man's Uncle Ben. He had a, he had a dark past. The original, I know, right? It's the original Uncle Ben. So he calls them back at the appointed time. They have got his chief of section, Wicks, there with him. He's flown in from Washington, D.C. Yeah, we see him like him get the call in D.C. That's an even more William F. Buckley accent, too. He's like, even Pasha. Sirot Redford is fucking traumatized, right? He talks to Higgins on the phone.

He says, this is Kondor, and Higgins says, this is Higgins. And he immediately goes, well, how come I need a codename and you don't? And Higgins just, fucking just stares for a second. It's like a very, very long pause where Higgins goes, all right, Turner. Which is quite nice. That's really nice. He's like, look, your section, all right, we're going to try to bring you in. Do you know this specific alleyway behind a specific hotel?

And he's like, yes. Yeah, he's going to, he's going to, your guy, your section chief is going to be there. He's going to be holding the Wall Street Journal under his arm. And he's getting more and more antsy. And finally, he delivers this perfect line. I'm not going in any alley with you or anybody. And fuck the Wall Street Journal. I agree.

Absolutely. And it, but it also, because he's like, he says, you're section chief of me, then. He goes, I've never met my section chief. I don't know him. I don't know you either. How the fuck of my supposed to say? It's a way better... Never seen it, Spider-Man.

It's really good. It's a way better sort of background than, say, Jason Bourne, right? Which I think this movie is in... I think we can usefully contrast this with the Bourne movies. Yeah, that's why I wanted to talk about this, 100%. You can usefully contrast it with the Bourne movies and with Siriana, I think. But the idea that, like, you've been working for the CIA for however knows how long, and you've never met any of these people.

You don't know their faces. all the people you know have been killed and all you have is like a phone number you can call to talk to a guy who is going to be rude to you is sick yeah it's just like being trans it's perfect establishing work it's perfect background it's really really good

there's even a spot where he goes to another guy who wasn't in work that day and finds him completely dead ass in his like apartment and manages to escape afterwards so yeah he he's like All right, look, I don't know any of you, motherfuckers. Who's someone that I'm going to know? I need you to bring someone to know.

And they, like, think for a second. I'm like, shit, there's a guy in accounting, Sam. You know him? Yeah, and he's my oldest friend. His smile when he mentioned Sam is like, oh, thank God. It's so good. Like, he's finally so, so relieved. He's like, yeah, fuck Sam will do.

Hell yeah, baby. I'll go meet Sam. I haven't seen Sam and yes. Can we go to the pub? He's supposed to get, no, he's supposed to, with Janus, go to Sam and his wife's house. that night, something is established in the first scene. So he's like, fuck, yeah, Sam, okay.

Yeah. So we see Wicks, his boss, briefing Sam, strapping a sort of a bulletproof vest on him. And then another little indication that something is, because the movie thus far is still, Robert Redford is crazy. Robert Redford is crazy and he is going off the reservation and the CIA need to bring him in. But so he just casually asks Sam, like,

oh, how do you know Robert Redford? He said, oh, we went to, you know, we went to university together. We, like, we were both friends with my wife. He did a podcast called James Bond. That's right. And then, and then Wicks just inexplicably in this sort of mid-Atlantic accent just leans over him. He's like, oh, Redford ever fuck your wife?

And it's just, what'd you say that for, man? What? What? And it's just this little seed of doubts that it's like, wait a second, maybe these guys aren't trying to help him after all. Yeah, so they finally, like... They meet in the alley, and this is, this is such a fucking good scene. Because everyone involved is unbelievably nervous.

Like, there's his section chief, there's Sam, there's fucking Condor, and they're like, all at various ends of the alley. Condor spots Sam, he starts walking down, and then it's so slowly. Like, they really take their time. And he goes, hang on, where's the other guy? Yeah, and the whole time, even like until this exact moment, there's this slightly annoying busker playing the same thing. three or four notes on a trumpet in the distance.

And it's just like... And it's just... It's slightly overstimulating, right? It feels like being nervous. And you just can't quite get it out of your head to concentrate on what's happening in front of you. But Dev, then what happens? Then his section chief, like, kicks over a trash counter to distract him, leans out from behind and just fucking opens fire. And that's like when you're like, holy shit!

Shit, this dude flew in straight from D.C., especially. This is Section Chief specifically to kill this absolute fucking no-one. And the entire time, like, he's shooting back. Sam is going, it's him, it's him, man, what are you doing? The Section Chief gets shot through the leg, and Condor runs away. And the last thing that the Chief does before he collapses is to straight up kill Sam. Shoots him right above the bulletproof vest, straight through the throat. She's from the neck, yeah.

It's also a really bad really bad choice of when to open fire by the section chief. I would have shot him in the back I would have shaken his hand and then gone, hey, I welcome me,

hey, come in and then shot him in the back and kill them. The section chief really fucks up and therefore the rest of the movie happens. But not everyone's a cold-blooded assassin like me and Carmen from Spike. That's right.

That's right. Sure. So then Robert Redford goes to a shop and carjacks a woman. Yeah, Yeah, just when the movie starts to suck. Mm-hmm, yep. Relationships are all about kidnapping the right woman.

And so he walks into a store, it's like an outdoor supply store, and Faye Dunaway walks in to order some skis, and he's like, okay, I kidnap Faye Dunaway. He's like, that's Faye Dunaway. Yeah, quite straight to as out. I recognize her from the Thomas Crown Affair remake. Fay Dunaway sort of playing Faye Dunaway. Like, she does a great line in Imperious, but that's also her only kind of. of line, like, whether it works for the character or not. And so, so he kidnaps her at gunpoint and, like, immediately sees right through her.

There's this great bit where she's like, where do you live? Do you live alone? And she tries to lie. And he says, yeah, no, you definitely live alone. And it's great. It, like, it really establishes, like, you know, she's kind of fast, but he's faster kind of I think it's good. Meanwhile, Higgins goes to what would in, sort of in the born movies would be the room with all the screens where they track, hack, tap, bypass. In this movie.

Screens haven't been invented, so it's just a room full of dudes. It's a room full of dudes all smoking with separate telephones. They've got a sort of bright orange conference room. Incredible furniture. Yeah, I'm reminded of the weird soundproof room in the 2011 remake of Tinker Taylor Soldiers. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that is a very conscious sort of trying to encapsulate the 70s from the perspective of a film that was made

11 years ago, whereas this is like, you know, just meant to be reflective of what people thought it would look like at the time. And in a way, like, it's so weird. That strange 70s orange, you know what I'm talking about. Like, like, like, you're in a, it's in a UN office or it's in some kind of fun. fucking space station or it's literally like Soliaris but like there's something that weird orange color like you

said smoking the insane furniture everything about it like it just has this ambiance of like we've formally established the color palette of the corridors of power and it's very very strange when it's done because like it it seems dated but then like it would have seemed

dated in the 90s now it seems like a fucking different planet yeah it's perfect and so so Higgins reads them um the Condor's file, which is, and this is something I really like, it's totally unremarkable. This is the point at which in the Bourne movies, or in almost any other action movie that you do these days, you go, oh, this guy was Special Forces, he was in Delta, he can kill a guy using a spoon.

He did 15 tours in Antarctica. Bench pressed 5 million tons. Yeah, exactly. He was bitten by a radioactive spider. Instead. Just whatever a spider can. What he said was he did like two years service, six months overseas, and... It's not even handgun certified.

Yeah, it was... And he was in the Signal Corps. And what I like about this is when he says the word signal core, you can hear the entire room roll their eyes. And it's like, there's this, I think it speaks to like a real difference in how military service was viewed in the 70s as to how it is now, where you have like, what, like one, two, percent of people under 30 have ever been in the military for any capacity for any time. Whereas at this point, it's like, yeah, he was in the signal course. So what, fucking everybody's done that. It's totally normal.

Yeah, I guess because there was like a world war. So like, it's like, yeah, everyone was in the army in some capacity a few years ago. Yeah, I mean, his age, he looks like he would be somebody who would have, the thing about it is, is that in those days, the U.S. military was drafting people. Like, even before Vietnam, there was the draft. And if you remember the dates on his things, it basically sounds like he was drafted in the late 50s. He then worked for Bell Labs, you know, as a telephone wire guy for like 10 years before being recruited. But fundamentally, like, his military service wasn't because he was an elite super soldier.

It was, he probably had to because he was drafted. Like my friend's dad, he was, he worked for IBM pretty much his entire career. But he, same thing, got drafted. he finished college and then got drafted and spent two years in the Signal Corps and then went to work for IBM in like the early to mid-60s and basically stayed on for like 40 years and then retired. And like that path, like you said, that would have been normal. It would be normal for basically any dude of say mid-to-late 30s in the early to mid-70s.

It would have been normal for that person to be either a Vietnam veteran or have been drafted pre-war when, because they ramped up the draft in America in Korea and then like basically post Sputnik certainly with all the red scare shit in the 50s they started ramping the draft up and so like... And his job in the military was he was a telephone lineman.

Yeah, this comes up later. How old is Robert Redford meant to be in this film? Because like, it was made in the 70s which is when everyone who was 20 looks like they were 55 because they all smoked and ate like shit. Robert Redford was born in 1936 which puts him like in time I would say he's supposed to be like

he looks like he's supposed to be to his mid-30s Wow okay he looks like shit I'm sorry He also looks great because I think he doesn't look like shit to me Because it's just a reminder in the 70s That like the noble protagonist is chosen By whether or not he started to go bald

When he's 30 Because every fucking dude is balding in this film Because like they hadn't invented hair plugs yet One of the things that I really like about this too As someone who has no military experience, but reads a lot, right? And there's a big fucking nerd. One of the guys goes... Tom Clancy, a podcasting.

Exactly. Goes, well, how the fuck has you been able to, like, do all of this shit and, like, escape our grasp? And we get a great little bit of dialogue. Where did he learn evasive moves? He reads. This doesn't make sense. Sure, man. Fuck, okay.

But there's also a line, too, that I thought was really interesting, which I believe was Max von Seedhouse character again, or Joubert, where he basically says, the reason why he's been able to escape you is because he's not reacting like a trained professional. He's not a trained professional. So we know what you're supposed to do. And he's just panicking and he's made. So because he's unpredictable, that's why you're not able to predict him. And I was like, yeah, that's actually like, that's a way better than suddenly this guy is like, hey, I was, you know, I strong fucking telephone lines and I read books, but now I'm Jason Bourne. That doesn't really make sense. But this guy, like he's acting out of a sense of self-preservation

but not as a trained spy but then like as time goes on you see him start to get better at stuff too that's the thing that's interesting about is he's just like you said he's just a dipshit but he's forced to do spy stuff and so he eventually like the CIA boss is this like damn

is this guy gay he sounds gay oh oh that that fucking line I have the line so the CIA boss is trying to figure out like did he kill all his co-workers Is he, like, going into business for himself as a mercenary? Is he selling us out? Has he been compromised?

Homosexual, broke, vulnerable. Is he a boy motor? Is he a twink? He doesn't even say homosexuals because it's sexual? This is John Houseman, by the way. Fuck it, phenomenal actor, like prolific throughout the 70s and 80s. I'm trying to think of anything that the listener might know him from. And the only thing that I've come up with is that he was the driving instructor and the naked gun.

That's like Oh fuck That's a great reach term It's like This is the guy He's so fucking good At being old man In a suit going

Yes but let's consider Now the possibility That this man might be gay What about that? And the entire time He's going like Maybe this guy's based as shit Maybe he's cool

It's cut across to Robert Redford Like panicking like a little bitch In this woman He's taken captive's house Being like All right I need to think I need the fuck You're going

Track mode of stuff He might be a twink. He might be an otter. He might be a bear. Is he ingesting a hundred milligrams of karma day? Performing reverse lunges. Sir Robert Redford has like kidnapped Fade out of way. He tells her pretty much what's going on.

He goes, yeah, I'm in the CIA. I'm being hunted. I don't know why. She doesn't believe a word of it. Very rightfully, she looks in like, what? Yeah. She just briefly goes, oh, by the way, you know, I have some shirts in my closet, which look absolutely fire on you. Yeah, there's an unnamed, unseen character that is this woman's, like, boy boyfriend, partner, who apparently is, like, the fit king of New York, because, like, all of everything that this, everything that fucking Robert Reffer just pulls out of a closet fits him not only perfectly, but is the flyest shit I've ever seen.

Yeah, all of the shirts have, like, fucking, like, double pockets. The shirts have, like, epaulets. It's wild. All of his colors stick straight up and are, like, a foot long. Also, at one point, at one point, when he is pulling the shirts out of her closet, he goes, You a clown? CIA clowns. Of a sex stool.

So, on the news, he hears that Sam is fucking dead. Yeah. And he's like, oh, no. So he ties this, he ties. I need to say, Frida Carlo. We have to talk about, we have to talk about sex, right? There's a lot to talk about, yeah. No, no, no, no, I know, but the sexuality, I mean.

Because, like, the air of this, like, compare this to a modern movie, right? Like, your modern movie hero kidnaps a woman. I would say in any movie that gets made these days, first thing they do is reassure her, like, hey, you know, I'm not a rapist, right? that's not what the vibe is here. Robert Redford does not do that. He just fucking lets that hang there for a while. And so he's in her house. He's looking through all of her shit, all of her photographs, because she's a photographer.

And they're kind of flirting, even though she's terrified. And again, I don't know if you would make this now. I don't know if you should make this now. But you can see the outlines of what this plot's going to be, which is, do you think love bloom even during a kidnapping, right? He begins to win his hostage over by like liking a photo she took of a park bench. Yeah. Like he analyzes it to her and he very specifically is like, no, no, no, this isn't winter.

Like this is, this is November, right? Yeah. It's, yeah. And so he's like, he's willing to threaten her. He's exhausted because he hasn't slept. So he literally like pins her down on the bed just to sleep. And it's like sort of implicitly sexual, right? And it's implicitly sexually threatening.

But I think the attitude of this movie is, A, sort of like he is judged by his actions, right? Like it never even occurs to him. And B, it's fucking Robert Redford. He looks like Robert Redford. How upset could you be, right? And that's the more dubious thing to me is that I think that's sort of something that's in the movie's mind at this point, if that makes sense. He ties her to a toilet and steals her car to go to Sam's house?

Yeah. Yes. Yeah, there's a lot here to discuss. Yeah, she's like, she's like, refers to him as having roughed her up, and he gets very offended by that and responds by immediately roughing her up, which is interesting. She does a great Faye Dunaway line, or rather a great line for Faye Dunaway to deliver, which is, that gun gives you the right to rough me up, not to ask me personally. personal questions.

He goes, have I roughed you up? Have I raped you? And she responds by going, the night is young. Which is, and the fucking, again, the tone of that line, there's some ambiguity there, right? This is something that we see made explicit later on, but like, having tied her up, it reminds me of a fucking, like, dirty postcard from the 1950s that I saw once, which is a burglar has tied a woman up, he's like, he's got the swag bag with all of her valuables, he's got the domino mask, he's climbing out of the window, and the caption is her saying to him,

so what, you're just gonna fucking leave? That's... I see, I see. First of all, she just like me. Second of all, that's kind of what Faye Dunaway's sexuality is portrayed as in this movie, is women love being kidnapped, provided it's by a, like, sensitive guy. it's weird but so he ties her up and he leaves of them

would you let a sensitive white boy kidnap you one time and that's the answer is yeah yeah absolutely yes actually appearing in my DM to be like Queen can I can I tie you to the toilet and then to do the car can I do that

I know it's like all of my like flirt with my caps as like an AGP so there's this this movie There's a lot of cutaway scenes, right? This movie not only does not pass the Bechdel test, but it also is unable to pass the corollary ultra Bechdel test that I've just invented.

Not only there are no scenes between two women. Every scene between two men, they're still talking about Condor. Yeah, yeah. That's true. That's true. It fails the Joubert test because we go to we go to Washington, D.C.

Where Juba explains the thing about like, yeah, he's not a professional. He could misdirect you by accident, not even know he's doing it. He's talking to a guy we don't know yet. And the guy's like, okay, we didn't kill everybody, that's fine. Can you kill Wicks to cover it up for me? And Juba, like an absolute Don, like the gentleman he is, it's like, yeah, that one's on the house. Because it's on me, I fucked up not killing Robert Redford.

So I'll just do that one for free. It's nice of him, yeah. So at this point, Condor has headed over to to his deadmate Sam's house because he was still supposed to meet him there for dinner of his wife. Yeah. And we see, we see incidentally, the little sort of throwaway, oh, do Robert Redford ever fuck this guy's wife thing?

He absolutely did. 100% he did. Shagger. Fully. He's on an Olympic level of not explaining shit to anyone, though. So he walks in and she's like, yeah, someone's been calling me and just hanging up immediately, and he just like, he's like, you have to leave now. And she's like, why?

And he's like, get out of the fucking hat! They're just shoving her into a fucking elevator. And she's prepping a 70s dinner party, and all I can think of is, I know it smell crazy in there. She's pouring the fucking gelatin over the fucking carrots. Like, it's going to be bad in that, man. It's going to be horrendous. But so he puts... She doesn't know Sam's dead.

No. No. He puts her... He doesn't tell her. I think she's still wearing a dressing girl, but he puts her in the lift and just says, like, go to fuck off. And then in the lift on... Get out of this film! And she does.

Yeah. And so he gets the lift down. But in the lift is none other than Mr. Eurovibes himself, Joubert. Max von Siddow. Max von Siddow. Who is ice fucking cold, this whole scene. Because the lift's going down. People get in and out.

There's a guy with a cake. There's some kids. And again, any other movie, you're assassin, right? Who knows who he's looking at? The Condor is like avoiding eye contact with him, and Jouva is just like casually maintaining that eye contact. But he doesn't seem inconvenienced, he seems amused, right? He's enjoying himself.

Yeah. Big scaramanga vibes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When the kids get off the elevator, he's like, I bet they're the same everywhere. It's just this incredibly tense at a moment. It's all done through eye contact, and they're both really good actors. It's just really good. So, but then we have to do some more racism, right?

Of course. Yeah, this, I'm very stupid. I didn't read this as racism because it's a mixed-race group of youths, but very specifically. He encounters a group of youths, but let me phrase it in a way that makes it sound much more racist than it's portrayed, which is he tells the first black guy in the movie, you can't tell me you've never broken into a car before. yeah i mean that is what he does max von siddell leaves the building first and robert redford is like okay i'm pretty sure max von siddha's going to shoot me

as soon as i walk out the door but he's probably not going to do it if i've got a bunch of people with me so these kids are hanging out of the lobby and he says oh i left my um my keys in my car has anyone got like a coat hanger or something i can put it under the window and fish them out and he turns to like who is good with a coat hanger yeah that's a bad thing

yeah yeah yeah um but then he yeah you're right alice he turns to like the first black person in the movie and says you can't tell me you've never broken into a car before. I'm not going to offer a defense of this but I will say that it definitely is in keeping with the portrayals of characters like this

in films from this era I think one of the best examples of this I can think of is we are constantly told to marvel at the chase scene and the French connection and quite frankly it is very impressive especially when you think of

the technical limitations of the day. But Gene Hackman's character in the French connection is like an Irish cop in New York who's just flat out racist, goes, just randomly goes into bars and beds die and roughs dudes up and is like, I will plant drugs on you unless you give me what, you know, I want, that kind of a thing and calls them slurs and all sorts of stuff. And I feel as though in the 70s, my impression of American films was that there was this nod towards sort of like oh yeah

authentic people are racist so to be authentic you have to show them being racist cinema verita exactly to work in class racism yeah and I feel as though

there was always an understanding like that they would justify this by saying like oh yeah we know it's bad but it's true to life but then you ran into the eternal problem that for example Archie Bunker was supposed to be portrayed as negative

but then Americans just watched him being racist and we're like, yeah, I like this guy. I want to watch him be more racist. It is definitely one of those things. And I mean, I'm a little bit muddle-headed right now because I'm a bit unwell, but I could think of some other examples of 70s films where you are just taken back by how overt that is and how it sort of passes. It's like, it's to the same degree as like, oh, they light up cigarettes on a plane and nobody bats an eye, because obviously that was a thing back then, they just say insanely racist shit, and it's like, oh, yeah. You just say a slur on the plane.

So, so he escapes using this group of youths' cover as a little touches. That's what I like in a film, right? Like small little details. And so, Joubert follows him into the street, and he uses the scope of his, his rifle to read the license plate. Oh, but it's not a rifle, Alice. Oh, no, it's a, it's a brimhandle mauser, I know, but I was being... I was going to say, he's got a, he's got a...

sniper pistol and it's just one of the strangest assassin weapons I've seen in a film because genuinely the scope is about twice as long as the barrel so he just it it looks as though he's being sent out on like a fucking comedy comedy mob hit where he has to kill people with the most improbable weapons possible this was the finest designated marksman weapon of the austro-hungarian army look there's basically no weapon that I find more amusing or love more than a really embellished pistol. Like, it's the funniest shit you can do is just have like a shoulder stock on a fucking pistol. Have you seen the Jeffrey Star Gun? I've seen the fucking Jeffrey Star Gun, yeah.

A pistol with a really long barrel, the fucking guy from... That wasn't the detail that I wanted to talk about. The detail I wanted to talk about is after he reads the license plate, you can see his lips moving because he's like trying to remember it. It's just a perfect little thing that, like, most actors and most directors wouldn't think to do. He's repeating it to himself. And I'm sure there. Do you not forget my naked.

So he goes back to, he goes back to Faye Danoi's apartment to have sex or so. Yeah, here's a bad scene. Yeah, women love it when you kidnap them at gunpoint and tie them up. I mean... I knew you were going to do that. You going to do that? So, having been, like, tied to a toilet for the past however many hours, she's now, like, insanely horny, right? Because, like, that, like, the way that he seduces her is he talks about the photos some more.

And then he asks her what would be a fatal question to me. Why haven't she asked me to untie your hands? And then she's like, yeah, okay, sex now. And we get her... No, it's weirder than... that even because he comes back after a long time of her being handcuffed to a toilet and immediately

he at gunpoint has her phone her boyfriend and explain that she won't be arriving until tomorrow night and then it's... Can Chad move though? And the shot the shot is so fucking tight like it's both of their faces and that is 100% of a shot

is this woman on the phone and Robert Redford right fucking there and you know he has a gun The gun isn't shown in the shot, but, like, it's, this man is a threatening fucking presence, and she goes, like, Chad move, make your girl call her boyfriend and say she's not coming over tonight, like, damn. Yeah, I mean, this is very, very alpha male, but I'm maybe not. And then we have. As the viral tweet says, if you let a trans girl talk about her hyperfixation interest for 14 minutes and then say you're so cute when you get excited and give her a head pat, you will get whole. And that is what happens.

Listen, that's a 100% effect. strategy. And then we get the most baffling sex scene I've ever seen in my fucking life. Yeah, Mr. Black. This is like a sex scene if someone had like trained a fucking AI by making it watch other sex scenes from the 70s and not explained what sex was to it. You know how Pierce Broson had a special sex move, right? Which was, I think it was to like bite their thumb or something, right? It's a shoulder, yeah.

It's a shoulder, bite their shoulder. Yeah. Well, Faye Dunaway has a special sex move. A normal sex move that happens normally. No, it's weird to do. No, it's not. Her special sex move is in the middle of having sex to just whip her head to the left facing the camera, just like she's just seen someone come in.

That's like, this happens like three times in this scene, too. Yeah, but also there's a lot of like jump cuts. I mean, I don't have this many jump cuts when I have sex and I'm a YouTube video. I'll say it's like. You have to stop for the costume changes. I have to say that this is such a good, good, good movie. I really like this movie. This is the worst sex scene.

I think I have ever seen. It's something else, man. It cuts to unconnected photographs. If it is shown as a photograph of hyperfixation. Yeah, the photos are hers because she's, like, frigid until Robert Redford is able to, like, make her not frigid by giving her the fucking Robert Redford penis. That's the point of the scene. But the photos, they don't get any less frigid. Like, you've been a bit of photo of, like, I'm being, like, crude, but a flower opening

or a train going into a tunnel. Yeah, I'm trying to a tunnel. Absolutely. I mean, I was thinking about the only thing I can think of, and it's a different style of being a bad sex scene, the only thing I can think of in a film where I have been more put off by how bad a sex scene is, is do you remember the fading into black and out of black in the film 300 during the sex scene. Oh, my God.

Where it fades out and you're like, wow, that's relatively tasteful for a sex scene for a movie this lurid and stupid. And then it fades back in to him just nailing his wife from like different positions. Like an unironic version of the OSS-Sondy set joke where it pans back down. You just see him pumping. Yeah, it's like six, six fucking in and out black face to black. And there's just different positions of him nailing his wife over and over again. Fades to black.

And then you're like, oh, that's a very refined. and it fades back in and it's from the shot like behind the guy where you can see his balls bouncing that's the shot that they use and they're like, oh, for fucks, come on. We are going to need to watch 300 at some point from the podcast.

We might have the second one's good. So the next morning, Christ, the next morning, Robert Redford is up early. He's making coffee. He's making house immediately. And he's had sex with this woman and she's been like captured 100%. She comes in and she goes,

You're really a very sweet man to be with, which I understand to mean you are the only man this decade who eats pussy. I believe that to be the case. Apart from Roger Moore. Yeah, that's true, obviously. As a matter of course. Yeah, and so she establishes this kind of, again, sort of dynamic, right? She's like, do I have permission to take a shower? And then, very, very weird fucking line.

Well, tell me about it. But she goes, like, he asks her to help with the CIA thing. She believes he's in the CIA now. And she goes... It always depend on the old spy-fucker. And then he acts like she's called him a slur. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it's a bad word for spies.

It's a line that, like, the delivery and the rice say they don't match, right? The old spy fuck. Yeah, back in college, they used to call me the old spy fuck. The old spy fuck was the alternate name for this podcast. That's actually not a back on. And Robert Redford looks at her like he's just been shot. He's like outraged. Yeah, you're not supposed to call spies, spy?

I think it's like, it's purely a person of espionage. She gets mad at them later on for a line regarding this. You can only call him a spy if it's like in a sexual context. It's fucking non-sexual context? No, I mean, afterwards, when you just have, Then it's weird, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

It's like the T-sler. Like, you can't use it unless it's horny. Like, Spy brackets horny. Yeah, that's right. We also see... Spide rackets horny was also the alternative day of this podcast. Is it too late to change? Honestly.

It's a good screen name. Meanwhile, we get like one shot of Joubert killing wicks like you said he was going to, which is... This is so good. This is... Okay, this was a different time in nursing, right? Right? It's in Gouvernair Hospital. There are two nurses, they're watching the heart monitors. One of them just flat lines. And one of them turns together and goes, hey, is that the guy in room 18? And they just, with the most resigned energy in the world, just picks up the phone to call it in. Nursing back in the day must have been the easiest fucking job in the world if you could be like, oh gosh, a guy dying, better call a man to deal with this shit. And then just fucking, I don't know, go back to your crosswords. Perfect

People forget that sexism is actually really good for women Yeah because I love not doing any work It's no, it's rules It's complicated for my girl brain And I gotta leave it to the men to do it Therefore, you know I gotta just sit here with my feet kicked up

And that's crazy Yo, one of my patients just flatlined fucking That sucks CPR I couldn't possibly With my little girl arm muscles I would hurt my nails if I did. She really doesn't even go have a look. Yeah.

It's so good. She doesn't even look. It just sparks up a cigarette immediately. Oh, fuck this. There's no wonder that the survival rate for heart attacks is actually really, really good these days, and it's just because we decided to teach women CPR. So, meanwhile, back at the ranch, well, well, well, well, well, Faye Dunaway, yeah, yeah, while Faye Dunaway is showering the Robert Redford off at Percy.

The mailman arrives and he's like, hey, you've got to sign for this package or someone's got a sign for it. And that's something that I like, incidentally, is that... He goes postal. Almost all the killers in this movie rely on, like, social obligation. Like, hey, you're going to walk down this alleyway to see your friend. At one point, Jeaubert's like, hey, you know, please get out of the lift first. Someone has to sign for this package. It's like something that you kind of...

instinctively no is wrong, but you're being socially compelled to go along with, because it's just sort of part of your socialization. It's really good. He's like, look, someone's got a sign for this package, and then he goes, all right, fine. He opens the door, and Melman hands him a pen, and the pen doesn't work, naturally. And he goes, look, I'm sorry, man, I don't have enough pen. And, like, there's a brief pause there before Redford's like, yeah, okay, go on, I'll get a pen. Like, you're in, baby, you done it.

it's a perfect fucking um perfect scene and then he goes completely sicko mode he realizes his shoes are too fancy to be mailman's shoes so he instinctively goes for the pen but instead grabs the coffee pot and throws it at the guy that's an awfully hot

coffee pot while he's trying to shoot him with his silenced mac 10 and that touches off what I would like to describe as alcoholic foo uh yes you're fucking right speak on it, brother. Because, Dev, you sent me a screencap and you said, it looks like if Colin Firth was in a

zombie movie hiding a bite and very clearly turning, this guy does look like, alcoholic, paunchy Colin Firth, doing roundhouse kicks and fucking kung fu shit. And, like, the fighting isn't bad. It's just weird. It's like disco elysium shit. Yeah. He's kicking at head height. The mailman, like, has his hands in Kung Fu stands and he's just, and then Robert Redford's

just, like, brawling normally. It's really weird to see a two-person fight where only one person is to pick comfort. Do you remember, I want to say it's die-hard or maybe die-hard too, where like in order to establish in advance, maybe it's tired with a vengeance, to establish with that one of the villains is like a fucking martial artist, like the opening scene, like in the opening credits is like intercut with scenes of him naked doing Tai Chi in his hotel room. Just like to be like, look, this guy is he's ripped and he's yoked and he's jacked and he's a martial artist and so then when he starts knowing martial arts like you aren't necessarily surprised by it

when it happens later in the film that's a pretty ham-handed way of doing it but like you know what i mean though they've established the exact same thing with george lazenby in the man from oh my god yeah but in this case in this in this film there's no sort of advanced notice that the alcoholic mailman knows kung kung fu so it just comes out of fucking nowhere and it's like he's like full on doing 70s gun cutter Like it's blowing my mind It comes out of nowhere Because it comes out of nowhere for Robert as well Like it puts you in his shoes

To be like holy shit This mailman knows Kung Fu Holy fuck Holy shit The alcoholic male man knows Kung Fu He does end up killing the Kung Fu Mailman With some difficulty

He takes like a Holy shit The fucking reverse Colin Firth From Us by Jordan Peel Has attacked me And he votes fucking Kung Fu Yeah And then you beat a

ass with a fire poker and then wind up, if I remember correctly, he winds up shooting him with the 45. The 1911, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And not the Mac 10. He doesn't take the Mac 10, even though one presumes that might be of use to him. I feel like every bullet had been used to be honest with you. They kill him, they take the shit from his like corpse, which is like a piece of paper

and a hotel key, and then they both run. Yeah, with like a 70s phone number on, it's like Albuquerque 257 or something like, yeah. I also want to note the fucking whenever he swings the poker it makes the noise of something being swung in like a fucking kung fu movie right like it's like baffling folly there's a lot of phone shit in this movie

so like he traces that phone number back to yeah because he's a fucking count which cell linesman a phone cunt yeah but he he traces this back to the CIA's New York headquarters in the world trade center yeah we didn't mention that But earlier on, we just like, before we meet Uncle Ben, we just like suddenly dramatically cut to the Twin Towers. Well, like, there's the thing.

He drives Faye Dunaway there. He's like, okay, let's get this over with. Cut to pan up the whole length of the fucking World Trade Center. Yeah, so it could cut back to Robert Redford's training in Signal Corps school where there's a guest student from the Saudi Arabian Army. And he's just like, man, he's like, I feel like our friendship is going to pay dividends in the future. It's a real problem for me growing up in the cultural milieu that I have that when I see an image of the Twin Towers, my immediate response is to laugh at it. Because they just use it as an establishing shot and I'm like, oh, I get it. Yeah, there's a bit in the animated series of Men in Black where someone's like, oh, what's the tallest building of Manhattan?

And Asian Jay is like the World Trade Center. It's like, uh... So together they kidnap Higgins out of his office. Yeah, because Robert R. Redford is like, look, why are the CIA trying to kill me? I think it has something to do with my report. Like, I submit my report about, like, I think I've found some weird shit. And then, like, the next day my section chief flies in from Washington to kill me, like, clearly I'm onto something here. What if there's a CIA inside the CIA? Yeah, what if there is? A second smaller CIA.

And Higgins can't, like, refuses to help him other than to tell him about Jobert, who is this, like, mercenary killer who has been hired by someone inside the intelligence community. I didn't know that the phrase intelligence community was that old, but it is and Robert Redford has a joke about it even. Community. Jesus, you guys

are kind to yourselves. Community. Yeah, I wrote that down. It's like, he refers to it. He's not from within the community. And Redford's like, fuck's sake, man. Were it they? Yeah. The family, the company. Fuck you, dude.

It's not a community. You just follow each other on Twitter. that's all it is there's like no community at all but do I talk like a CIA but Higgins Higgins is like

I'm not going to help you and then Joe's like look with great power comes great responsibility and he's like yeah okay fine Joe Bae's back sponsored out he was in Skyrim

and a bunch of other things he's European he was um Blofeld and never say never again yeah so so he he traces he traces Joe Burr back to using his telephone

phone hacking training. Traces Jebvre back to his hotel room where he's painting his little Warhammer minis. Yeah, I also love that. I do too. Him painting miniature figurines was one of the, that just made me laugh out loud watching it. Yeah, like Drax and Ronin. I was going to say, this is the second bonus movie where we've cut to like a famous

actor just painting minis. Choosing to believe this is the same guy. Well, that's the thing, right? Is it, Alice, you have your conception of based Eurovives, but I feel like that's based Eurovibes sexual and he is based Eurovibes. non-sexual, like, like, if you are, if you are a guy who wears a Trilby and a camel haircoat and you kill people with the world's weirdest pistol, like the world, like the shortest barrel and longest scope on a pistol, and you paint Warhammer figurines in your hotel room and

crucially never consume alcohol, that is like based Eurovipes non-horny, whereas if you're that's true, deeps van der Boostia and you have your, your, your, your DSM shop with the pup, like, then you're sexual based Eurovives. Yeah, that's right. God, you're so right. But so he does some phone hacking. Yeah, he does phone magic. Through a number of reasons. Like, he gets Jobert's hotel, like, number, like, his,

which hotel it is and which room it is, because he, like, takes the key to a keycutter, and he's like, look, you can fucking read, on the side of this there's a serial number. Can you just ring up the fucking manufacturer and ask them what hotel they are, lying to, to which the dude, and I'm a classic New York guy, is just like,

I don't want to read about you on the news, pal. Yeah. And it's then immediately paid off. And he goes, ah, I got none. Yeah. He's like, hey, yo, I got like this big water, one dollar bills. Is that going to solve your problem? The guy's like, shit, man, that's like my rent for a fucking year.

What I want to say, though, is this is an interesting thing because, yeah, he traces the number. He gets the, the hotel and the room for that that key. He then goes, to the switch exchange in the hotel, which I guess makes sense back in those days if they had them, he then listens, he records it. And what he's able to do is listen to the phone conversation and the phone numbers that basically he crank calls Joubert and does. And then Joubert then calls

his contact. And what he does is he records the touchtone because he can then play it back to an exchange where it'll basically connect him to that call. And he's able to identify that number and figure out, if I remember correctly, that it's the regional director of the CIA's Middle East divisions. Atwood, his name is. Atwood. He does phone magic, which obviously,

I imagine at the time, like, watching this, you're like, holy fucking shit, you can do that. But at this point, I'm so removed from the concept of landlines that I... Remember how the thing in fucking The Hunt for Red October is, like, you think it's a throwaway about, like, oh, yeah, the ability to... access a submarine by a hatch

by clamping and pressurizing and then it comes up in the like and then they actually have to do it and then I was fucking honking like a goose because I was like I cannot believe it like they did such a good job of making it seem like ancillary information that Jack Ryan is taking on and then it matters it's the same thing with this like signal core guy but he basically like he does

like yeah signal core like telephone guncata and does nerd magic it's incredible like it's to me it's so well done and I think that was one of the moments where I was watching like especially when he's in the New York the big New York telephone exchange and he's able to like wire the circuits together so they can't

trace the line but he's going through what looks like what looks like a fucking like primitive technology crypto mining farm of all of these like telephone wires and just where I was just like this is a thing that existed it would have been normal in 1974 but this looks like in like

this literally looks like a Tarkowski movie now because it's so removed from the present what's really really funny is that Higgins tries to like trace the phone because he calls Higgins to be like hey who's at incidentally I know you're fucking me and Higgins cannot trace the thing

despite going to a big arcade cabinet whose sole purpose is to say trace completed I love this fucking cabinet I want to make it the episode art it's perfect Can we also say one thing about Higgins because at this point if I remember correctly the Higgins

has the Hidgens kidnap happened yet or are we getting to that? Yeah that's happened okay we've been and gone Higgins's fucking coat Oh, he's got like this fur trimmed. Fuck. It might be fox fur even. Yeah.

It's definitely like real fur. It's like a double breasted coat with fox fur on the collar on the lapel. And it basically, the best way I could describe it is that like if you were watching a 70s sci-fi film where they've got Doc Holiday but he runs a brothel, like 100% that's what he would be wearing. Fuck, man. That is the code that you buy the year before you realize you're a trans woman. Maybe I should get into wearing, like, cowboy boots, and then you have a realisation. Yeah. So I have two pairs of carbon boots over in the corner.

Oh, I know. You just fucking owned me. Sorry, I'm sorry, three. We're all neurotypical. So we, at this point, I'm normal. He has to go and drop off Fay down away. He has to end their affair, put her on a bus to Vermont, where she's going to go and meet her boyfriend. And at this point, the movie sort of, like, takes a holiday into film noir.

right? Like, all of the shots are bordering on it, and all of Faye Dunaway's lines, it's really like, she talks about how his eyes, they aren't kind, but they don't miss anything. I could use a pair of eyes like that. And then there's this fantastic line where he asks what her boyfriend is like, and she says, oh, she's tough. Well, what's he going to do? And he finds out and understand. And he goes, wow, that is tough. And it's just pure Bogart is what it is. Yeah, it's really, really good. I like it a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, but he, you know, sort of swears her to secrecy,

and they have this parting moment that's a little bit Casablanca. It's really good. Yeah, and she leaves the movie, which is a really good choice. And he departs into more steam than I have ever seen in the entire time I've been to New York City. They managed to make what I believe to what's supposed to be... It's supposed to be the train. The train, the Penn Station, yeah, but like...

Yeah. be really when you think about she's going north to or he's rather he's going south to dc so the only place that i can think of where you would catch a train in those days or now to go south would be new york penn station and so i just do not recall for the life of me ever seeing it be that smoky and grimy like it looked like i'd never seen anything like that before but there's such a good effect of like they're parting and the tension ramping up because he's got to make the train before it leaves and you hear the conductor calling last call all aboard stuff like that and then like the steam and the smoke and shit like there's just something very atmospheric

about it and it's it's like the train had come in from the 1930s just to do the noir thing extra yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah very much so yeah I agree and another thing that we've failed to note though is um as this is a spy movie set in New York it is Christmas it is yes which is good because everyone's wearing a huge coat and I love a huge coat And gloves, also very good gloves. So he breaks into Atwood's house and then, unseen, goes through his record collection in order to find a suitably threatening vinyl record to start blasting in the middle of the night in his study to get him to come down.

Good thing he lives alone, apparently. It's cool. Yeah. And also had a surprising sort of taste in music, because he plays him this sort of quasi-funk song about having you right where I want you. But so he holds him at gunpoint, he's like, why did you kill my friends? The Jason Bourne thing, who am I? Who do I work for? Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then he has the sort of the vulgar Marxism.

His whole damn thing was about oil. And it was. Atwood had, like... Oil! Like your classic rogue department thing that we've talked about for ages, you know, it's a CIA within the CIA. They were going to invade the Middle East for oil. And then he accidentally stumbled upon it, so he had their entire section killed. At which point, Jubeu, Mr. Euro vibes, enters the fucking scene, holds him at gunpoint. And you think, okay, well, he's gonna kill him then.

But instead, he kills Atwood. On behalf of the CIA, having been working for him, totally unsentimentally. He's like dusting stuff off a fingerprint. He's like, do you touch anything other than this chair when you were like going, who am I? Who do I work for? Big scaramanga vibes. It's really good. Maxxon said out so fucking.

Because he walks in and he like executes this guy and he's like, he was about to become an embarrassment. You seem based. Would you like to become a hitman? This conversation, they have this little debrief from the way back out. And learn the ways of a hitman. He's like, how did you know which woman to kidnap? And he says, I just picked it random because she looked like Faye Dunaway. And he's like, with the sort of detached appreciation of it, like a chess play, he's like, really?

I never would have guessed. And we get this like, this beautiful sort of counter, actually, it's a counterpoint to two things we've talked about. First of all, do you recall the bit in Siriana where George Clooney goes, whatever the most dangerous thing is that you do on your daily life, you'll be killed doing it? Yes. We get a counterpoint to that where Juba explains. to him, if he stays in the United States, how he's going to be killed. He's like, you know, they'll send someone that you recognize, and they'll send a car, and then you'll have to get in the car, and you'll be killed.

Which, again, it's the same thing, but it's great. But then what follows it is sort of a counterpoint to the movie Ronan, where he says, well, why don't you, why don't you go into business for yourself, why don't you run? And Ronald Redford doesn't want to because he's a patriot, because this is the 70s, but also because he would find it tiring. And he goes, no, it's not tiring. It's quite restful. It's peaceful.

You don't have to... You don't have to believe in anything. You don't have to think about any causes. The only thing that you have to trust in is your own precision. And it's a great fucking piece of character. Don't have to have the cognitive effort of subscribing to an ideology or pretending to. It's fantastic. Just to subscribe to a Patreon.

That's right. Thank you for doing so, by the way. I do think that it's very interesting how the... This is a sort of paranoid domestic spying scandal kind of thing, but you recognize the extent to which the Cold War is just looming so large over this that I feel like this film better than a lot of other films of this period that I've seen kind of captures paranoia, but also it doesn't really, it doesn't over-explain stuff if it's not necessarily relevant to the character.

Like, I think they do a good bit of establishing the thing, that you need to know about Robert Redford so that what he's doing later makes sense. And there's, I don't want to necessarily call that like maturity, but I think there's a degree to which it trusts the audience to be paying attention. And that is something that I really appreciate

about films from this period. Also, something I've said before is every now and again, you will watch a film, you know, because this is almost 50 years old, that has the pacing of a modern film or something close to it or something recognizably like if this film

would come out 20 or 30 years later it wouldn't have seemed like slow and out of date and so on and so forth. There is definitely some 70s line delivery in this film to some extent. I would say Faye Dunaway

definitely is one of those people who comes across like that that viral video on YouTube of the girl doing like every single 70s female actress line which is every is like it's like Robert you think I've never tried dope like that kind of stuff.

One exception. It always depend on the old spy fucker. She slips out of Faye Dunaway to do that line. It's weird. You think I've never smoked grass. Like, it's just, there's an extent to which I appreciate that this film for all of its, call it weird 70s flaws, still has a certain degree of, like, seriousness and maturity and sort of trust in the viewer. And you genuinely will miss a lot if you aren't paying attention the entire time because it's

sort of assumes you will be. And I appreciate that. Like, there's, like, I'm not going to call this a perfect movie, but I understand why people like it so much, um, even if it does have the worst sex scene I've ever seen in a film. Um, there was, there is the sensation that it's sort of like, it's something very, very original. And that's the thing I like them. I really, really like the idea that like living that kind of life of, you know, being a fugitive could be relaxing, could be liberating. You never fucking see that anywhere anymore. And it, it, it, explains so much about why Joubert is the way he is

that it's like, yeah, no, you don't have to do anything. You can just paint your little fucking Warhammer minis. You just have to get in the painting minis. Yeah, exactly. There's some nice stuff speaking of the dialogue. The 70s dialogue editing, I noticed, that the dialogue editor left a lot more space between each character's lines.

You would normally have in a modern film. Normally, this is partly because of the influence of modern acting training, actors are really taught to pick up our cues, but also just the way that films are edited for pacing you won't normally get a line and a pause and a line and a pause but you do in this and it really kind of lets things sit

and the film uses time and conversational time in a very effective way I think So the Condor goes back to New York and he meets with Higgins who is about to bring him in and he tells him well actually you can't first of all because I have you at gunpoint but second of all because I have told my story

to the New York Times that the CIA printed a whole load of transphobia yeah really weirdly the CIA has developed these plans to invade the Middle East for oil right

but you know even and they were gonna act on them unilaterally I wonder what that would be like no it's not even that like Higgins is like look this wasn't a real plan we were just like wargaming this right

we were just trying to figure this out But Atwood was like, fuck, this would work. Let's just do it. And we were like, it's time to kill this man for this. And like, we have a great line, which is from Robert Redford, going, do we have plans to invade the Middle East? To which Higgins goes, absolutely not. A movie made in 1975.

I guess maybe they didn't. But so Higgins feels moved to, like, justify the CIA, right? And his thing is, today it's oil. Tomorrow it might be food. or plutonium, which, I'm very sure. People aren't going to, like, want a democratic vote on whether they get these things when they start running out of them. They're going to want us...

Because they're not going to get a vote on it either. To go and get them. And there's this, I think the crux of this line, right? It's like, what do you think people are going to do when people who have never known hunger start going hungry, right? There's so much there about the sort of guilt. an uncertainty of US prosperity, right? And of course, like, people were already going hungry in the US in the 70s, and what the CIA did about it was to sell them crack, but like...

Yeah, but just not people who fucking, like, matter to the CIA. No, but by the end of this decade, by the end of this decade, and by the next decade, people who did matter to the CIA were going hungry, and it didn't move them to do much for their prosperity either. Yeah. It's a busted flush, at least now. But it reads so quaintly, and at the time, it's like, uh, you know, a little bit of sort of a few good men or whatever where it's like, oh, actually we need to do this because this is how your, your lifestyle is sustained is by me doing this stuff. And it's, it's like, okay, but the historical examples you've given is that, that they didn't happen. It just, it, it, it, that's not how it happened. Um, also, the other thing about this, right? Because the ending, the ending is quite ambiguous, which I like. Like, the ending is he goes, I have, uh, the condor goes, I have told my story to the New York Times. Uh, and, uh, Higgins just, well, first of all, he kind of like visibly quakes in his boots a bit at the suggestion, which is very funny. Yeah, deeply funny. Yeah, but, but he rallies

himself a bit and he goes, well, how do you know they'll print it? And if they don't print it, you're going to be killed. Uh, and, and all Robert Redford is left with is to go, they'll print it a little sort of uncertainly as he leaves. And sort of, I would say the implication there is that, like, I don't know, that to me is the movie grabbing the microphone and being like, a free press is the cornerstone of democracy, pentagon papers, etc., etc., which, sure, okay. Yeah, they've given it to their top man, this guy called Jesse Signal. I've told this guy Glenn Greenwald a story. I'm sure this won't come back on me at all. Listen, I used encryption for it. It's fine. And that's the movie.

It's a Jeffrey Toobin. Yeah. That's three days of the Condor. What did, I mean, what did we think of this movie? What do we think about fucking, I don't know, the 70s, New York, society, feminism. What does it say about masculinity? What does it say about masculinity? I think this is a really good counterpoint.

It says it's okay to kidnap a woman, provided you don't like rape her. You just let her be into it on her own time, which is two days maximum. Yes. That's what, yeah. It's interesting because having watched the born identity, which is according to our objective spectrum, the scum system, the best movie we've ever seen, you can really counterpoint the two between each other because it's like, dude is hunted, doesn't understand why kidnaps woman. And like the car ride home is the point of divergence between the two. because on the car ride, which is only like six hours in the fucking Bourne identity, like they just start talking and they like start to genuinely hit it off.

Whereas in this one, he's still suspicious. Yeah, again, if you let a chance someone talk uninterrupted in 40 minutes. That's actually what he does to her as well. Jason Bourne doesn't even really kidnap her. He pays her. Like, it's, hmm. The fact that the car ride is used for such different purposes in this because three days, of the Condor, adapted from the book, Six Days of the Condor. My man was on a budget time-wise this time.

And instead they use it to like really sell that this guy is really earnestly and genuinely paranoid about what's occurring here. Yeah, and dangerous. And dangerous. Absolutely. I would say that I absolutely loved this film. I realize it's got flaws. But I think to me, you know, I hadn't seen. the long goodbye or the taking of Pelham one, two, three until a couple of years ago.

And movies from that era of sort of like America's falling apart, 1970s are so cool to me, especially when there's just like a lot of slice of life stuff, you know, kind of included in them. And I think this film actually may have more than the taking of Pelham, one, two, three in a lot of ways. But you more, more, you know, sort of like you have the scene, like the sandwich shop, the locksmiths, her apartment in Brooklyn Heights which I mean it's really funny too because it's like she's never established what she does for a living Brooklyn Heights has always been kind of bougie and that is a nice fucking apartment yeah the rent now three thousand dollars a second yeah exactly there's so much more uh yeah I mean it is it is on the ground on the yeah the basement of a

brownstone but still like it's very nice but uh what I would say though is that I felt like I got a lot more of that that treasured weird 70s ambiance from watching this film but I think that even despite that, like, it could still be a very bad film and have all that. It's not a bad film. I think it's very, it's indicative of a time. And then, like, if we want to talk about hauntology, I feel like the idea of making a film in which the CIA is unambiguously the bad guy. Sure.

Yeah. You know, the CIA is unambiguously the enemy of peace. It's a very, very strange thing when you think about where we are now as far as, like, how American cinema represents American life in America's. presence in the world. So I just, I really, really enjoyed it. I found it to be an absolute delight to watch. And it makes me want to find more weird 70s films to watch, hopefully.

The parallax view, something like that. Yeah, that hopefully I can find other viral tweets about insane outfits that make me want to watch a movie. The outfits in this really incredible. I mean, this is the major way that you end up coming on to these episodes is that we will mention of movie and you will be in the group chair like, holy shit, that movie is great. and we're like, get on the fucking pot.

I think we did the exact same thing with fun for the Red October. You basically just have like the king's choice if you ever want to be on an episode. I wasn't on the episode of the name of the Rose, but I appreciate you citing your sources when you quoted me as saying

that Brother Beringer was tearing through twinks like Sherman through Georgia. That's right. Yeah. I understand this. You said that before. before I watched the fucking movie as well, so I had to watch the movie with that

in the forefront of my mind the entire time. You cannot say that I don't understand the spirit of this show. That's right. Well, we have a science-based racing system on the show. It's called the scum system. Wait, this is a bonus episode, isn't it? Oh, in that case, I can use it if you were like, I don't know.

That's going to fuck up the whole metric. Okay, well, if I don't want to fuck up the whole metric. I hate to fuck up the whole metric. No, no, absolutely not. Well, in that case, it only remains for me to say thank you for subscribing to the Patreon we will be producing more bonus content

whose turn is it next time this was my pick so who it might even be mine so watch this space yeah no I'm sorry in advance grabbing my seat

that's right but in the meantime thank you for listening and we will see you next time Thank you for listening to yet another episode of Kill James Bond. Next week, on the free feed, we commence our Jack Ryan Tom Clancy series with Patriot Games, That's 1992 starring Harrison Ford, the first of a few series that we will be watching through starring Harrison Ford. I'll tell you that for free.

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