Kino Lorber has released a 4K UHD upgrade of 1975’s Three Days of the Condor.

This still exciting thriller was one of the best of the cycle of conspiracy films that Hollywood produced between 1971’s Klute and 1981 ‘s Blow Out. That memorable cycle also includes Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, Marathon Man, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, Capricorn One, and Winter Kills.

Nominated for an Oscar for its adroit editing, it lost to Jaws.

Directed by Sydney Pollack, Three Days of the Condor was one of seven films the director made with Robert Redford as his star. Coming off the dual box-office successes of Pollack’s The Way We Were and George Roy Hill’s Oscar-winning The Sting, for which he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor, Redford was one of the most popular stars of the day as were co-stars Faye Dunaway the year after Chinatown and Max von Sydow two years after The Exorcist. It also gave Cliff Robertson his best role since winning his Oscar for 1968’s Charly, and John Houseman his best two years after winning his Oscar for The Paper Chase.

Dunaway would go on to win an Oscar the following year for Network, Redford would win for directing 1980’s Ordinary People, and Pollack would finally win one himself for directing Redford and Meryl Streep in 1985’s Our of Africa. Only von Sydow would end up Oscarless despite subsequent nominations for 1988’s Pelle the conqueror and 2011’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Ironically, the Oscarless von Sydow was the only actor to win an award for Three Days of the Condor. He was named Best Supporting Actor by the Kansas Film Critics.

Based on James Grady’s best-seller, Six Days of the Condor, Pollack’s film shortens the time span of the novel and moves its location from Washington, D.C. to New York City where Redford’s character is a CIA agent whose job it is to find hidden messages in books. On the fateful first day of the story, he goes for lunch for his officemates, all of whom are gunned down by a group of assassins while he is gone.

The rest of the film involves Redford trying to stay ahead of both his duplicitous boss at the CIA (Robertson) and the gentlemanly assassin (von Sydow) whose job it is to kill him. Dunaway excels as the innocent shopper who Redford kidnaps as his cover.

Although many films have featured New York City’s World Trade Center in its nearly thirty-year existence from the mid-1970s, Three Days of the Condor is reportedly the only film to have been allowed to film inside one of the towers where Robertson’s character has an office.

The 4K scan of the original camera negative does the film justice. The two-disc release features a new audio commentary by film historians Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson as well as Pollack’s previously recorded one. The Blu-ray also includes a 2003 interview with Pollack and Redford on the making of the film and a 2004 retrospective of Pollack’s career.

I highly recommend this one.

Two new 4K upgrades that I don’t recommend are The Mask of Zorro and Elizabeth, both from 1998, neither of which are worthy of the upgrade.

I have nothing against Martin Campbell’s version of the Zorro legend, but the definitive version remains Rouben Mamoulian’s 1940 classic, The Mark of Zorro, with Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, and Basil Rathbone as Zorro, the woman he loves, and the principal villain respectively. Campbell’s version is a different take featuring two Zorros, Anthony Hopkins and Antonio Banderas, with Catherine Zeta-Jones as the woman the younger Zorro loves. Campbell’s version was nominated for Oscars for Best Sound and Sound Effects Editing, both of which it lost to Saving Private Ryan. Mamoulian’s film was nominated for Alfred Newman’s stirring score, losing to Disney’s Pinocchio.

The awards grab of Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth baffles me to this day. It was incongruously nominated for seven Oscars and won just one for make-up over Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love.

Included among its nominations was one for Best Picture over the likes of Gods and Monsters, which won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Bill Condon, and The Truman Show, which received a Best Director nomination for Peter Weir.

Cate Blanchett received the first of her eight nominations to date. Her fans still grouse about her losing the Oscar to Gwyneth Paltrow in the year’s other Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare in Love. Many of us think the Oscar should have gone to Fernanda Montenegro in Central Station over both. Blanchett went on to receive another nomination for reprising Elizabeth in the even less appealing Elizabeth: The Golden Age nine years later.

The problem is not Blanchett, who does her best with the material she was given, but the film’s screenplay which is filled with blatant historical inaccuracies. Her performance, though adequate, is not as compelling as those of Flora Robson, Bette Davis, Glenda Jackson, and Helen Mirren, three of whom played Elizabeth twice and one who played both Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II.

Robson starred in the classic 1937 British film Fire Over England in which she was supported by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh and all but stole the 1940 Hollywood swashbuckler The Sea Hawk from Errol Flynn and Brenda Marshall.

Davis was triumphant over Flynn and Olivia de Havilland in 1939’s The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex and was equally amazing in 1955’s The Virgin Queen supported by Richard Todd and Joan Collins.

Jackson won an Emmy for the 1971 TV miniseries Elizabeth R and happily reprised the role in support of Vanessa Redgrave in the same year’s Mary, Queen of Scots.

Mirren won an Emmy for the 2005 miniseries Elizabeth I and followed that with an Oscar for playing Elizabeth II in 2006’s The Queen.

Happy viewing.