Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Pamela's movie. Dinner was a delicious roast beef, amazing kale/bacon/potatoes (Nora had 2 servings), and slightly over-roasted sweet potatoes. Dessert was a fantastic apple tart (Nora had 2 servings). Special guest: Rebecca. This night was memorable because it was the last EVER telling of the 9/11 Stony Lake Peter's Birthday Cake gluttony story.

Boxofficemojo interviews Sydney Pollock:

Box Office Mojo: Let's talk about Three Days of the Condor. Why did you prominently feature the World Trade Center?

Sydney Pollack: I was looking for the logic of where the [Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)] might be [located]. I didn't want to have a building that said CIA on it because I didn't think that would exist. I figured they would want some kind of anonymity and that the best kind of anonymity are these two massive buildings with thousands of offices and you wouldn't know who's where. [Production Designer] Stephen Grimes was great—he had a nose for locations—and he found the Twin Towers. He found the alley, which was spooky and eerie and weird, for the [climactic] meeting in Three Days of the Condor.

Box Office Mojo: Did you shoot inside the Twin Towers?

Sydney Pollack: Yes. We shot the lobby, the second floor mezzanine lobby, the hallways, the elevators, down the hallway to the office. I loved them. I used to go [there] with my kids. My youngest daughter and her new husband came to visit me in New York and it was the first place I took them—the World Trade Center—up to the top. I loved those buildings. I used to occasionally use a helicopter to come in from [John F.] Kennedy [International Airport] or wherever and, coming in at sunset, looking at Manhattan, it was the view of the city—it made the composition of the shot—the skyline—perfect.

Box Office Mojo: What is the theme of Three Days of the Condor?

Sydney Pollack: Suspicion. From a behavioral point of view, in terms of defining and writing the characters, of directing the picture, it's about a man in a paranoid business who trusts everyone—and he turns from that to a man who's suspicious of everyone because of what happens to him. In the process, he meets a girl who trusts no one, who has her worst nightmare happen—a guy kidnaps her at gunpoint—and she finds that she blossoms. So, at the end of this movie, when they say goodbye, he's the suspicious one, suspecting that she may tell on him. That was the way we wrote it, trying to imagine these two separate arcs going in opposite directions.

Box Office Mojo: Isn't it based on a book?

Sydney Pollack: Yes. The book [Six Days of the Condor by James Grady] was about a bad group of guys inside the CIA who wanted to smuggle heroin. It was a potboiler. They hollowed out books and put heroin in the books.

Box Office Mojo: You excised the heroin from the motion picture version.

Sydney Pollack: I wasn't interested in heroin. It was boring. There were a million pictures about dope and, also, I wasn't interested in bad guys and good guys. I was interested in something much more complex. The Sixties were just over and I was remembering what happened when all cops were referred to as "pigs." I thought it must be a bitch if you're a really good cop—suppose you're a really good cop—and you know there's a bomb in that trunk but you do not have the legal right to search the trunk. What would you do? So the metaphor was: suppose there were a group of people inside the CIA that know about an impending crisis but also know they can't do anything above board about it. That they know for a fact that the oil supply, if it was choked off, could bring this country to a standstill.

Box Office Mojo: This was following the 1973 Arab oil embargo?

Sydney Pollack: Yes. But it was before the lines at the [gasoline stations]. We were prescient on this picture by accident, not by design. We were saying, let's find a crisis where these aren't a bunch of bad guys trying to make money for themselves; these are guys that honestly think they're saving America—that's why Cliff Robertson['s character] says: "what do you think [Americans are] going to want us to do when the cars don't start or when there's no food on the table? Are they going to want us to be moral or are they just going to want to get the oil? You know damn well what they're going to want. They're going to want the oil."

Box Office Mojo: Robertson's character also makes a point about what would happen when one of those hostile states gets plutonium—?


Sydney Pollack: That's right. I'm much more interested in the CIA guys who are trying to help us and do something [widely considered] immoral than I am about guys who are just immoral because they want to sell dope and make money. That's boring to me. It's much more complicated to say, here's a bunch of guys whose job it is to protect us and they're saying there's no way we're going to sell the fact that the Middle East [states] control the oil and if we don't get control of the oil and they [seize its production], we're going to end up with what we have now.

Box Office Mojo: That's what happened in reality—what the Three Days of the Condor conspirators predicted.

Sydney Pollack: Exactly. You've got every Middle Eastern country now trying to get an atomic weapon—or they already have them. Our point [in Three Days of the Condor] was that [the oil crisis] is not a simple problem.

The Big Clock (1948)

Peter's movie, but Nora made a superb meatloaf with roasted veggies. Peter made his signature gluten-free brownies for dessert.

Robert M. Ryley on the life of poet and novelist Kenneth Fearing:

Consolation, however, came almost immediately at Yaddo, where he met Nan Lurie, a handsome thirty-two-year-old artist. She had grown up speaking Yiddish in New Jersey, gone to Paris on her own after high school, and won a scholarship to study under Yasuo Kunioshi at the Art Students League. She and Fearing met within a week of their arrival at Yaddo and stayed on together during the winter after most of the other residents had left. On Christmas day, with less than a dollar between them, they ate their first meal alone together at a restaurant in the Black district of Saratoga Springs. By the spring, when they were both back in NewYork, Fearing was wildly, deliriously, giddily in love and writing notes and letters of astonishing sentimentality, even falling into such clichés as "I am not good enough for you." He cherished what he called Nan's "sheer lunacy"--her "vitamins," her "stray cats," her "religious quarter hour," the "confessions" she wrote in the dark, blindfolded. (In his poem "Irene Has a Mind of Her Own," published four years later when his ardor had cooled, he looked on similar flakiness with a less benevolent eye.) In the winter of 1944-45, he moved into Nan's loft on East 10th Street, and, his divorce having become final the year before, they were married in Greenwich, Connecticut, on June 18, 1945.

While still at Yaddo in March 1943, Fearing had been having trouble mapping out a new novel. Inspiration had to wait for two events: the sensational murder in October 1943 of the New York heiress Mrs. Wayne Lonergan, and the publication in 1944 of Samuel Michael Fuller's little-known thriller The Dark Page. Transformed and refined, details from the Lonergan case and Fuller's novel would coalesce in Fearing's imagination to produce the plot of his most famous book, which he wrote between August 1944 and October 1945.

Published in the fall of 1946, The Big Clock made Fearing temporarily rich. Altogether he took in about $60,000 (roughly $360,000 in 1992 dollars): about $ 10,000 in royalties and from the sale of republication rights (including a condensation in The American Magazine), and $50,000 from the sale of film rights to Paramount. In 1947, Nan won $2,000 in an art competition, a sum they dismissed as negligible but that only two years earlier would have seemed a fortune. But Fearing's successes always contained the germ of disaster. Overestimating his business acumen, he had negotiated his own contract with Paramount, permanently and irrevocably signing away his film rights, and relinquishing his television rights till 1952, by which time, he discovered to his rage and frustration, Paramount was showing late-night reruns and had thus cornered the market.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)

Nora's movie. Nora was at a MoveOn congressional action training event till very late, so had to rush to LaLa's for takeout, and was late to her own MovieNite. Serviceable lemon tartlets for dessert.

BFI on Seance on a Wet Afternoon:

Séance On A Wet Afternoon (d. Bryan Forbes, 1964) is easily the darkest, and maybe the finest, of the five films which Richard Attenborough and Bryan Forbes co-produced. Forbes adapted it from a 1961 novel by Mark McShane, a British-based crime writer whose penchant for odd titles resulted in such books as The Crimson Madness of Little Doom (1966), Ill Met by a Fish Shop in George Street (1968) and Lashed But Not Leashed (1976). Although the story's protagonist, Myra Savage, later returned in McShane's sequel Séance for Two (1972), the film turned out to be the last, and least financially successful, of the Attenborough/Forbes collaborations.

Despite the critical and commercial success of Attenborough and Forbes' Whistle Down the Wind (d. Forbes, 1961) and The L-Shaped Room (d. Forbes, 1962), financing for Séance was hard to secure. In addition, although Attenborough agreed to co-star as the hen-pecked husband, Bill, the main role of Myra, the clairvoyant wife, proved very hard to cast, with actresses like Margaret Lockwood, Anne Bancroft and Simone Signoret proving to be either unavailable or uninterested, or simply not considered sufficiently commercial. At one point, Forbes even toyed with changing the role to that of a man, hoping to get Alec Guinness and Tom Courtenay for both leads, before finally settling on American stage actress Kim Stanley.

The film's opening is slowly and deliberately paced, as we see Myra and Bill exchange increasingly strained and sinister dialogue while making rather mysterious and methodical preparations around their house. Strong character scenes between the submissive husband and the increasingly unbalanced wife play effectively alongside the suspenseful kidnap and ransom sequences. This approach is seen at its best in the film's central twelve minute section, in which Bill's frantic collection of the ransom at Piccadilly Circus underground station is intercut with a sedate policeman's interview with Myra back home. The scene effectively juxtaposes big city anonymity with suburban familiarity.