dctrainer

In my younger days I was a UFO addict. "Flying Saucers: Serious Business" was my Bible. I followed NICAP and Major Donald Keyhoe assiduously. He was a retired Marine officer and aviator for heaven's sake! How could people deny the obvious reality of alien visitation. But alas, I grew up and gave up childish things. And each new wave of UFO hysteria gets more tiresome than the last one. And this one is no exception. Are the videos of fast moving objects by military jets intriguing and difficult to explain? Possibly but that's a LONG way from proof of alien activity. Especially in an age of highly maneuverable autonomous aerial vehicles which are proliferating by leaps and bounds in volume and sophistication. This turns out to be a 'documentary' for the credulous and true believers, not for those seeking proof.

I saw this while still in college, just when it came out. I invited a pretty classmate from the apartment across the hall from my apartment out for a date to see the movie. Basically our first date, we were causal friends and neighbors. We both definitely enjoyed the movie from the start, and she was definitely a Redford fan. For some reason the completely non-explicit sex scene between Redford and Dunaway really touched a nerve with my date. When we got back to her apartment I was thinking a brief goodnight kiss was possible, but she had other ideas and within moments she shed her clothes and we were acting out something WAY more explicit than the movie! When I was finally able to ask her what the heck that was all about, she could only say that the scene between Redford and Dunaway in her apartment had totally turned her on even though there was nothing explicit shown on screen. One of my first exposures to how complicated women really are.

I later took her to see a campus movie rerun of "Don't Look Now" with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. I expected a similar level of enthusiasm after the movie was over, but it was actually worse as the graphic sex scene in that film convinced her to start groping me in the theater! Be careful what you wish for I guess. And no we didn't end up married with children, but enjoyed our time together until graduation and careers sent us on different paths.

But Condor is definitely worth watching now as then. It's themes of government conspiracy, cover-ups, surveillance, assassination all resonate even more now in 2025 as they did back then. I've watched it several times over the decades and in each time frame I've viewed it, it has mirrored recent events in the news. You don't have to be a fan of Redford, Dunaway or Pollack to enjoy a great example of screen writing, and character and plot development to enjoy what is a good spy thriller with relevance to current events.

Friday nights were always a favorite time growing up. In the 1960's the whole family gathered to watch TV together, not staring at our own seperate devices in different rooms. Rawhide was the first show to watch that evening and if we were REALLY good our parents would let us stay up late and watch Route 66 right afterward. I loved the show for its portrayal of different parts of the US and all the varied jobs the protagonists found, along with the local color, regional characters and accents, and scenery. This episode was great for several reasons: the presence of Sylvia Sidney and Ben Johnson, 2 great film legends; the fracture of Buzz and Todd's relationship; and the back story of both Buzz and Sylvia's character. No matter how much two friends get along in life there will differences and disagreements just like the one shown here between Buzz and Todd. I always liked Sidney since her portrayal of Mrs Verloc in Alfred Hitchcock's "Sabotage" and the way she kills her murderous husband. A long career, all the way to "Beetljuice" and "Mars Attacks" no less. And Ben Johnson? A key part of so many John Ford westerns for decades, his film career capped by his well-deserved Oscar for "Last Picture Show" in 1971, he continued working in film and TV for 2 more decades after this brief appearance that should have been a much bigger role. I'm watching all the episodes in order again for the first time since I was a kid. This series holds up amazingly well in 2025 despite the passage of time. I was lucky enough to end up spending some time in Reno and Carson City as a result of my work decades later and was pleasantly amused at how some parts of those towns hadn't changed all that much since Todd and Buzz stopped there!