Three Days of the Condor (1975) — "They'll print it."

We're in Wayne Media. This section's been hit. Robert Redford. Level of damage. Everybody.

Dr. Lapp, Janice, Ray, Harold. Everybody is dead. In the next three days, everyone he trusts will try to kill him. I'll need your help.

Have I ever denied you anything? Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway. This week, CBS Sunday Night Movie at 9, 8 Central and Mountain Time. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the CultureCast. I am your host, Chris Stashew, and I'm joined by my good friend, all the way from the Great Plains of West Texas, once again, joining us, the professor, Dr.

David D. Perlmutter. Howdy, Chris. And also joining us for the first time on this show, he is someone that I get to say has been podcasting longer than I have, which is not a thing that happens very often. He has been the host of The Conspiracy Skeptic for, well, since 2007, so you do the math, I won't.

He has also written two books that I'm sure he will also tell us all about, Your Friend and Mine, soon to be a frequent, maybe hopefully frequent guest, depending on how this goes, host of The Conspiracy Skeptic, Carl Maymer. Thank you for having me on. I've been a big fan of your show for a long time, and I am just delighted to be on finally as a guest. And we were discussing offline, you know, you have to call Dr. Perlmutter, Dr.

Perlmutter. I get to call him David, but you can both address me as the podfather, okay? Yeah. I mean, I really don't think I've met anyone. There's only one other person I know.

And technically, since like you mentioned, you had been doing another show before the show that you now hosted even earlier than that one. You are the person I have met who has been podcasting the longest. So I think that that title is well earned. So before we talk about Three Days of the Condor, which is why you're here on this episode, Carl, tell my audience who may not know what the conspiracy skeptic is, A little bit about yourself, a little bit about your show, kind of what they would hear if they were to go and listen to your show over on your feed. Yeah.

Well, I mean, as it sounds, Conspiracy Skeptic, I cover conspiracies not too far into the past. You know, I don't go back to like the 1400s and like, you know, the Catholic conspiracy in England or something like that. But I cover things that are recent modern history. From a skeptical point of view, I have guests on. I've had.

David, Dr. Perlmutter. I've had him on a number of times, and he's always been an excellent guest, as I'm sure you have discovered. And yeah, I've been doing that since 2007. Before that, going all the way back to 2006, I was living in Seoul, Korea.

I was doing another podcast called Seoul Survivors, and that was a lot of fun. Just always had the podcasting bug Um, then I wrote, uh, I've written a couple of books, one called the skeptics book of lists. And then I came out with a follow on called the conspiracy skeptics book of lists. And three days of the condor was in one of my lists, like a 12 conspiracy themed movies or TV shows. And then I kind of pitched it to David and I'm like, Hey, why don't we do, why don't we do three days of the condor on, on, uh, on Chris's show.

And he's like, I can hook you up. The professor makes things happen with just the snap of a finger and the magic of the academic wand, I guess. Carl, I wanted to ask you, as someone who, and I used to host a show called Scary Stories We Tell, which I would say is more in line with what you do in terms of talking about kind of, you know, parapsychological conspiracy theories, stuff like that, kind of in that same corner of the world versus this show so much. But again, I was part of both. So I would consider that kind of the Venn diagram overlap.

I am so curious because, again, this is a film that takes place in the 70s, but we are looking at it in 2026 you know the film came out in 1975 September 25th which means we are recording this the 23rd of September so right near the anniversary of the film coming out as someone who has been podcasting for a long time who has been watching film and been part of the conspiracy conversation what Yeah. Yeah. Well, good question. And Dr. Perlmutter, I'll just call you David.

I'll just call you Dr. Perlmutter. So we're all on an even field there. Him and I actually discussed this quite a lot. And the big thing is really what we call the barrier to entry that in the 70s and the 80s and in the 90s, if you wanted to be a conspiracy theorist or at least one that got some attention other than, you know, you know, the guy filling your tank every week, you know, as your sole audience, you, you had to do a lot of research and you had to write books and read books and stuff like that.

And now it's just kind of like ship hits bridge conspiracy, pump that out there. Um, you know, fire in Hawaii conspiracy, pump that out there. And, uh, yeah. And it's really this democratization of conspiracy theories, maybe that it's like you get a conspiracy theory and I get one and you get one. So, yeah.

Everything there is now a conspiracy theory. Yeah. Yeah. Which makes it like that. You know, everything is if everything is the end of the world, nothing is the end of the world.

That's kind of what it feels like now. Exactly. And it's just it's just yeah, it's just. As I say, when I started doing my podcast in 2007, this was a lot of fun and it's not fun anymore. Well, and that was that was kind of the question I had for you, because that was kind of the sense that I started Scary Stories in 2020, right at the beginning of the year.

And we ended right at the beginning of 24 because every alt. I made the mistake of having co-hosts who had real lives, unlike myself, who like you, like you've already alluded to, does a lot of recording and that kind of eats up a lot of my time. And even then in that four years, things had become less fun to talk about in terms of conspiracy theories, in terms of kind of The level at which conspiracy theories were operating. I mean, I remember in the 90s growing up as a kid, like the books that I would get from the library would be books about conspiracy theories that were things that were being talked about in the 70s. Like JFK, like the Bermuda Triangle, like aliens and UFOs and stuff like that.

And it feels like those things are no longer part of conspiracy theory argument or conversation. Those things are their own thing now, which I think is also a very strange thing that has happened where now there's this delineation between Bigfoot, UFOs, other things, and then conspiracy theory stuff like this. It used to all be lumped into one thing, but because now... So conspiracy theory, like you said, has a little bit of a different tone to it. Those things cannot be lumped in with that anymore because the fantastical and the seemingly real, if you have those two things in close comparison, it starts to feel like, well, why am I believing something this fantastical?

And is this just as fantastical? And I don't know, like conspiracy theories, they're just not as fun as they used to be. And I'm glad you said it because I have felt the same way for a long time. Yeah, and I want to add to what you both said about how this movie sort of marks that transitional period from the prior age of conspiracy theories to the modern age of conspiracy theories. So I remember.

Watching this movie in the theater, not when it came out. I don't know why. I think I saw it on one of those college movie nights. This was in the 80s. And I had vaguely heard about it, but I saw it.

So I think this was early 80s. And I was sitting there with, I guess, 99.5%. 9% of college students. I was actually a master's student. This is late 80s.

And I remember sitting down and somebody who was younger than me, because I vaguely heard something about the plot, somebody who was younger than me said, oh yeah, this is Robert Redford and he's a CIA agent. It must be some conspiracy or something. And I thought, you know, if this was a movie made in the 50s about the FBI or, you know, a security agency, that wouldn't be the exact first thought out of the gate, the expectation that it's a conspiracy theory. And I actually, it reminded me, again, setting the stage for, we're going to talk about the sort of the cultural place of this film late 70s, Watergate, Pentagon Papers, Vietnam War, assassinations. Everyone of every political stripe is suspecting the government of something, and sometimes they're right, and suspecting big corporations of something, and sometimes they're right.

I remember in parallel with Another movie, late 80s movie, Sean Connery. You've reviewed it, I assume. I just haven't heard the podcast in your Sean Connery podcast. The Presidio with Mark Harmon. And that I also saw in the theater.

I don't know why I saw it in the theater. It was a terrible movie. But I'm sitting in the theater, and there's a murder at the Presidio, which is the sort of Western Pentagon at the time. And Sean Connery at some point says to Mark Harmon, there's a conspiracy. And it's the CIA and drugs.

And I know the. People who wrote the movie, who filmed the movie, who acted in the movie, had some expectation that an audience would be going there and would be sitting in the theater and going, but everybody in the theater burst into laughter. Because by the late 80s, claiming that there was a government conspiracy... was no longer something that you included in a thriller and you got any thrills out of. Sidney Pollack famously said, there's no message in this movie, it's just a thriller. And I wonder whether that was positional of him to say, we know by late 70s that trying to send a message that the government might be up to no good was embarrassing as a message for a movie.

And so we're just going to stick to this as just a thriller. Yeah, I mean, when this movie came out, it's one of those movies like China Syndrome, where, you know, the movie China Syndrome came out, and they weren't really expecting big box office, and then Three Mile Island happened. And this was kind of a movie, too, where it sort of came out, and it was like, you know, it was going to be an okay movie. And then right at that time, I believe it was the New York Times, they started leaking, it was called The Family Jewels, And the CIA, right around the time of Watergate, they're like, maybe we should actually kind of figure out what we've been doing. And if, you know, if our books are ever open, you know, what would they kind of hang us maybe, you know, literally on?

And so they compiled a big list of all the terrible things they're doing, the assassinations and, you know, infiltrating, like domestic spying and those kinds of things. And then, you know, they put it in a big file. And then some of that got leaked out to the New York Times. And that became like headline news just as Three Days of the Condor was hitting the theater. So suddenly it was like people who maybe like the FBI had a fairly noble view of the CIA, you know, because I don't know, was it like Yale or Princeton?

One of the Ivy League colleges was always kind of traditionally liberal. recruiting from one of those Ivy League colleges. But, you know, the CIA was for a long time was perceived as, you know, these, you know, these Yale Princeton graduates, you know, very waspy, you know, very, you know, very upstanding, you know, people and not involved in really a lot of nasty, dirty tricks. Speaking of nasty, dirty tricks on this episode of the CultureCast, we are going to be talking about Three Days of the Condor. So let's get right into it. So the film is directed by Sidney Pollack on a screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Reifel.

It is based on Six Days of the Condor, so it's half as many days of the Condor in the film. The film stars Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, and Max von Sydow, like we've already talked about a little bit. It is a Robert Redford conspiracy film. Hey, John Houseman is here, Dr. Perlmutter. talking about him, he's not a law professor this time.

He's a man who yearns for the days of war. The film is shot in New York City, which ends up playing a character unto itself, especially New York City of the 1970s. One of the times that I find to be very hard to replicate any other time than when you were filming it right then and there. Like you guys have already talked about a little bit, this film sits in the post-Watergate run of The Conversation, The Parallax View, and all The President's Men comes out right after this film, which obviously also stars Robert Redford. And this film is in the vein of those films.

The Parallax View we have covered a couple years ago. I think it was actually last year, Dr. Perlmutter, you and I covered it. So this is kind of the next logical step in terms of covering these kinds of films. So...

Carl, let's get back to you real quick in terms of the film, because I want to know when you saw it for the first time. But I also want to know specifically, because you are Canadian, I am curious, as someone who is Canadian versus being American, as someone who's Canadian versus American, how does the American paranoia in the film strike you? And how does that reflect with you as someone who's Canadian? I mean. I have people that I know that are Canadian, but I've never asked them this question.

And I feel like this question is uniquely suited for someone who does what you do. But what does that look like in Canadian politics or the Canadian culture in terms of that paranoia that is so, like Dr. Perlmutter already said, readily apparent in the way that these Robert Redford films of a certain time or Warren Beatty films of a certain time were so able to convey? What did that look like and what does that look like now? Well, You know, in Canada, I mean, not to disparage my fellow Canadians, but we're kind of America-lite.

So, I mean, we are enmeshed in American culture like, you know, as you guys are. So, you know, Watergate. I mean, as a child, I remember watching Watergate, you know, on TV, the Watergate hearings. Yeah, I'm pissed off. I can't see, you know, Rocket Robin.

Hood, but. There was a guy named Ehrlich, man, you know, and that was pretty cool. So, you know, but but yeah, I mean, it doesn't strike me as like, what the hell are those crazy Americans doing down there? You know, it was it. Yeah, it doesn't strike me as as kind of unusual.

And more, I guess, broadly, what are your thoughts on just three days of the Condor? First time you saw it, the usual kind of opening questions here to start the episode. Yeah. Well, I mean, I call it the banality of national security. It starts off with some branch of the CIA, and their job is to analyze publications and look for codes and look for anything suspicious being published, and they translate books into English and Robert Redford's character, that's primarily his job, is kind of an analyst and look for anything really, really weird.

And, you know, their cover is that there's some historical society, and they're working out of a very nondescript building in New York. And, you know, I mean, it strikes me as that is probably, you know, the way the CIA really operates, you know, that... it's, it's incredibly banal. It's all about, I mean, today PowerPoints, but, you know, whereas in my job, you know, my PowerPoint is, you know, how to better explain something to the customer, you know, their PowerPoints are about, you know, uh, you know, who do we kill next, you know, kind of thing. So, so it's, it's kind of fascinating in, in that, that, you know, that, and I think the audiences in the seventies, um, they really probably were really taken by what they think was maybe, you know, behind the scenes of the CIA.

And so, yeah. Dr. Perlmutter, same questions to you, sir. I thought this film, when I first watched it, was a passable thriller. I did not understand the plot.

I just thought it threw this... hand grenade of CIA cover-up something but what I remember after watching it walking out and there was a bunch of other graduate students and like we went for coffee or something and I said could someone explain to me why and and this is not giving away the plot of this old movie but like very early in the movie in the office where Robert Redford works quietly reading books in you know in his jeans but which uh Carl you're gonna want to talk about jeans in the 70s but He, everybody's killed. Okay, well, that's a good, that's a, you know, why are they being killed? Like, what, what incredible secret? Again, I would assume the secret was somebody was transmitting the plans of our latest hydrogen bomb or just, you know, the alien, the alien autopsy or something, you know, high level, and then it mumbles and stumbles into like oil for something somewhere.

And I guess that was my conclusion. These other people who explained it to me said that, yeah, really going with what Carl said, it was the banality of conspiracy, of willing to kill people for really reasons where they didn't need to be killed. I've read stuff online about this movie over the years, and nobody's fully explained to me why somebody reading a publicly published published book would trigger mass murder of your colleague, right? So right there, it threw me off back in the 80s. And my rewatch of just a I guess I'm going to go with Sidney Pollack, that there was this MacGuffin of, you know, a conspiracy, just insert conspiracy, which is really the point is that nowadays conspiracies, because they're so common, because as Carl was pointing out, like no event happens that within 15 seconds, you can't go to Reddit or, you know, 4chan or whatever.

And you're not going to see, well, don't you, didn't you notice in the background there, there was a white van and there was a glove and, you know, just, There's a conspiracy right away. So the word conspiracy seems to have been robbed of all meaning. And Carl and I and our mutual friend Julie Brannon did our analysis of Disclosure Day on Carl's podcast. And we were doing what we like to call God's work. Good.

Yeah. Yeah. And we were shaking our head going like, Steve, nobody associated with that movie apparently had watched Three Days of the Condor or watched any movie or read any Internet site since the late 1970s, since E.T. or Taken, because they were acting as if like there is a conspiracy going To hide aliens will make the entire audience drop jawed with astonishment and going, what? I can't believe that's the plot. This isn't we I don't know if you guys mentioned this in your episode you did on Disclosure Day, but we forgot to mention it on ours.

So I will mention it here. The thing that's crazy to me is this a film like Disclosure Day existed in a post ancient aliens universe where it's like one of the most popular TV shows on History Channel. And it's like the entire conceit of that show is they've been hiding aliens this whole time. I just oh, my God. The entire conceit of one billion social media and Internet posts can't be made into a movie.

And you have the audience astonished by the conclusions and that that apparently was lost on on. the creators of Disclosure Day. But I think this movie was one of the first generation of movies that basically demonstrated that, boy, you're going to have to come up with something bigger than government agency doing something dastardly to shock us. Or what I think has happened in Hollywood now, it's a plug and play. It's what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin. Like, okay, Insert government conspiracy here for Jason Bourne or John Wick or whatever.

Or, you know, if you look at Prime or Netflix, they've got one of these types of short run series where there's somebody chasing somebody because of some government conspiracy every week. And somebody watches them, but nothing is shocking. Well, I mean, I think. This movie, and I'm not a film student, but to me, this is one of the movies where it was like the CIA has to capture one of their own. And how does the CIA capture somebody who is practicing the tradecraft and can use all the tricks of the trade and avoid capture?

And not only avoid capture, but use those to figure out why do they kill everybody, including his girlfriend or his wife or something in the office? Why do they kill everybody? And then, uh, and then, and then, uh, you know, how do I keep myself from being killed? Right. So it, it, it, but they don't later movies have kind of taken that basic plot, you know, uh, you know, insider, we got to get him.

He's gone rogue. Uh, but, but they've sort of empty, you know, this guy is like super fighting skills and can, you know, shoot people with guns from, you know, a mile away and things, things like that. Uh, but yes, but to me, I can sort of see the evolution, like, like, you know, like, uh, I don't know, Jason Bourne or, or, or, Mission Impossible, those kinds of things. But, I mean, at the heart of it, right, it's just very mild-mannered guy working in a very nondescript office, and he's just reading books. And he stumbles on something that's kind of weird.

Like, you know, this book has been translated only into three languages, like Dutch, Spanish, and Arabic. And he's like, hmm, that's weird. And he, you know, passes that up the line. But as it sort of turns out, they've, you know, he's starting to stumble on this CIA conspiracy to foment a war and, you know, and America's going to seize the Middle East, their oil fields. Because again, this is coming around the time or just on the heels of the, you know, the OPEC oil embargo, right?

So I think- Previous to that, Americans just like, we got cars, we got gas, and we go. And it was really the first time Americans had to really start thinking about like, you know, where the hell does our oil come from? Oh my God, it's not Christians, you know, and that kind of worried Americans a bit. So it's kind of playing on that paranoia. And you both put this kind of already in perspective, but as someone who had not seen the film until just recently.

I do think now we, as people dialed into culture, even at all, even a little bit at this point, I think we do take for granted how, and you already put it pretty well, Carl, the idea of the democratization of the internet and what the internet and access to information has allowed for conspiracy theories to do. Now that conspiracy theories are easily like, now that information is easily accessible and you don't have to go to a library is really what this boils down to. Whatever information you're accessing, at least reputable information, and you can take that however you'd like, but I'm talking about in terms of published papers, scientific information, things that people were using before to make, you know, not educated guesses, but decisions based on scientific evidence that is readily accessible now, even for a cost on the Internet.

And the Internet in allowing that to happen has made, I think, people for better and for worse, in some cases, more educated and more insular in their beliefs on things and more unyielding in their beliefs on things, for sure. And in a time and place, like 1975, a film like this would have felt, I mean, again, yeah, it's coming out around the time where these things are coming out, but it would have felt kind of not, it wasn't shocking. It's just more like, again, like we've already alluded to, like it's coming out in a time and a place where people are already kind of getting wise to this and their understanding that this is happening for real. It's not just a film thing. It's not just a thing that people can dream up in a writer's room in Hollywood.

Like, no, this has actually happened. And maybe not to the dramatic theatrical effect of a film, but it's happening in a way that is still rather nefarious. And the nefarious nature of it, I think, is what the film I think it's interesting the parts of the film that are kind of musings on and you already brought this up, Carl, like, why are they doing what they're doing? And what is the point behind all of this? And once, you know, if the CIA or FBI or whomever looks inward on itself and the things that they're doing, would they like what they see?

And it's like, well, no, clearly not. The family jewels thing. It's I mean, that's a very kind of again, that coming out around the time of this is such a big deal because Seymour Hersh is. reporting i mean again i what's crazy to me and and you brought it up already how this kind of came into being in what universe what is it ever a good idea to compile all of our misdeeds into one document like i'm not saying like that i'm not saying that doing misdeeds is okay to begin with but here let's make one centralized document that you can essentially look through and find all the misdoings and misdeeds and misgivings all in one document in case we ever get audited yeah Exactly. Well, we did a little bit of light assassination.

Yeah. Some fomenting of regime change. It's just like, yeah, just a little bit, just like a dash here, a touch there. It's it's crazy to me that that's the thing. All that to be said, though, as someone who is watching this has and has only seen it, you know, again, recently and is watching it through the lens of someone who's only seen it recently.

It's a very interesting film because I think it does kind of fit very well into the parallax view, all the president's men, kind of that world of, you know, the conversation, like these conspiracy, conspiracy movies about not, not real. Well, again, all the president's men is a real conspiracy. So that's maybe the only one that I can't say to those other ones, but Those other two are about fake, quote unquote, conspiracies that are kind of based on real things or are inspired by real things. I mean, all the president's men is like, this is the real thing about the real thing. And it's like, OK, but I like how the conversation parallax you in this film are kind of of a piece together in terms of being about conspiracies, not anyone in particular, specifically in terms of real world, but inspired by this kind of amalgamation or public understanding of things that the CIA or FBI can do and are doing.

And like you said, Carl, at the time, CIA involvement in domestic affairs was I don't I mean, it's probably I don't know if it's worse now, but the 70s were when things were at their real kind of like churn and burn worse because they were doing some they were. I mean, we know that they're doing things now, but I think in the 70s they were doing things to a extent that probably even something like the family jewels doesn't document fully. Yeah. I mean, I think the American public, I mean, they got, they knew there was such a thing as the CIA and they thought they were doing something in, you know, Europe to combat communism. And they're doing stuff in Southeast Asia.

But until this came out and then the family jewels started to be leaked, the American public, I don't think, had a great idea that, you know, the CIA is spying on you guys. And I mean, yeah, they may be spying on the Black Panthers, whatever. But, you know, no, they're spying on journalists and they're, you know, they're spying on your kids at school and things, things like that. And so I think, you know, the movie came out first and I think people might've thought it was a little bit far fetched, but because it was released at the same time that the family jewels started to be leaked that, you know, people kind of could, could buy this as not like far fetched, but as like, Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Right. This is happening. And this is a movie kind of, you know, uh, the, the, the movie version of the family jewels. Yeah. And this movie is a time capsule, but it does have these odd, but I guess would have been predictable cultural resonances.

Any of everybody who isn't old enough to have watched the Seinfeld TV show, uh, look up on YouTube, uh, Kramer versus the U.S. Postal Service. And Kramer was the sort of wacky designated character on Seinfeld. And he decides one day that he's just not going to take any more junk mail and he wants to cancel his mail. Well, this massive conspiracy mobilizes against him.

And his friend, who's a Postal Service employee. Gives him this speech. Yeah, Newman gives him the almost exact speech that Max von Sydow gives to Robert Redford in this movie. And I recognized, and of course, if it was going to be in a sitcom, people, they expected it. People didn't need like, oh, you mean like in Three Days of the Conjurer?

People just knew it because it had entered. Sort of like Liam Neeson's speech, you know, about I'm going to find you. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's become a meme speech. This was one of the first movies that had a meme speech that, of course, many movies have had.

Casablanca can be part of the culture on YouTube and on TikTok without seeing the movie. So that was one part is that it has these sort of cultural transfer points. I don't know whether The Simpsons has done a three. The Simpsons must have done it. They've done every other movie in the history of humankind.

And then the, I want to go to the Max von Sydow character. Max von Sydow was this great, great actor. And he would just show up in every movie as almost all, I mean, he played Jesus Christ in the greatest story ever told by George Stevens. I'm correct on that, right? And so that's a range, right?

Yeah. He played a lot of what we call heavies, I think. Yeah, but typically he played A German general or, you know, here he plays this ultra professional assassin. And I think one of the other things this movie predicted is if you go back in time to movies in 50s and 60s, even bad guys and good guys had some sort of ideology behind their bad guy and good guy. But Carl is referring to banality and the idea.

And so a little bit of a history lesson for, I guess, some people. some younger folks, is that Hannah Arendt, this philosopher who wrote a book called The Banality of Evil, talking about the Nazis. I think there's been a sort of revisionism since then where she claimed that she was doing a– this was during the trial of a famous Nazi in Israel, Adolf Eichmann. And she said she looked at this guy and he looked like such an ordinary bureaucrat. And so she coined this term, the banality of evil. And it really– has resonated to the present day because Max von Sydow, you get an idea that if he got a phone call from China, he got a phone call from Iran, he got a phone call from Canada to do a hit, he would say, okay, great, just give me the information.

Here's where you deposit the money in the Swiss bank. I'll take care of it. Day of the Jackal, the original Day of the Jackal had a very similar, in fact, James Fox, who played the assassin in Day of the Jackal and Max von Sydow could have just traded roles in this. So this character of the evil killer who has no ideology, he's just doing it professionally really well. I think it has, if you see it today on a Netflix series, Amazon Prime, Apple or something like that, Max von Sydow helped draw that character out for us.

Well, I mean, yeah, that's the thing that the Max von Sydow character, he is a, you kind of, you assume through the movie that he's, you know, he's very aligned and he's working for the CIA. He's very partisan of the CIA. And then, you know, kind of jumping to the end, he ends up like killing the guy who hired him in the CIA, like the deputy director of Middle Eastern affairs or something. And once that guy is dead, Max von Sydow is like, well, my contract's done. And then just let's, you know, you think he's going to, he's going to pop, you know, Robert Redford and he's like, eh, have a good day.

You might want to disappear. They're going to come looking for you and maybe go to Europe. You know, the, the, the, the croissants are nice, you know, and, and, and that's it. And then you're kind of like quite shocked by, you know, that, oh, he's just this very apolitical, just tell me to kill somebody. I'll kill somebody.

And then I'll kill people on the other side as well. I don't care. So, yeah, he did care that off very well. And Dr. Perlmutter, like you mentioned, with the banality of evil, I mean, that's kind of the thing that, I don't know, that I think it's something that people my age say it's like, what a boring dystopia, right?

Like that's, I mean, you know, the dystopia as it was promised by I think that was the first film you and I ever talked about, Professor, was Soylent Green. And that is a rather like it's less banal than the dystopia we live in now. But I guess it's well, I don't know. I guess like it depends, like people being scooped up and being turned into food like is pretty messed up, but the government not admitting to it. would not be surprising even if they were or weren't doing it. But even that is more exciting than the dystopia we live in now in terms of those kinds of things happening.

And the evil that goes on as we perceive it now, it is and has always kind of been now done behind the kind of ledger books and Excel spreadsheets. I mean, I think often of The Sopranos where James Gandolfini is like, you know, How is it OK that the businessmen are killing more people than we ever could with what they're doing? And they don't care. And they're essentially like causing all kinds of harm to the world in a multitude of ways. And how is it that what they're doing is protected and what we're doing isn't when they're making more people's lives worse than we ever could?

And it's like, I mean, I do wonder that because, again, like the banality of it is like a big corporation like Dole or somebody, you know, taking advantage of workers in Costa Rica or whatever it is, you know, I mean, there's there's all those cases like South American, like fruit, fruit laborers being taken advantage of or Nestle or companies like that. It's like, how banal is that evil when it's the people that sell candy bars? Jesus, it's like the It's like Skynet, you know, or I'm trying to remember at the Universal Studios, they had a ride, the Terminator 2 ride. And in the line for the ride, they had like a fake Skynet thing. And it was like Skynet.

We make everything from consumer goods to nuclear warhead. And it's like that. That is now the world we live in. It's where it's like, you know, Disney, they own everything from making movies to, you know, Again, they don't make missiles, but yet, I guess. It's one of those things where the dystopia we live in now is just like, it's just a capitalist dystopia of everybody just wants to make more money and everything is more expensive.

Okay. I mean, this movie, I. Mean, for me, I'm a computer nerd. I'm also a computer history nerd. The first 15 minutes, what to me was the most interesting, because you're kind of, you know, Robert Redford, he comes in.

He comes into his little office. And the first thing that strikes me is he's wearing like jeans and like a sweater vest. Now, again, we have been living in a world where casual dress is just the norm. But, you know, people in 1975 were going to think this is kind of odd. A guy's just coming in in jeans into a workplace.

And he gets in there. And then the woman kind of at the front desk, again, you know, If you're going to, you know, if we're going to show a gun in the third act, you better introduce it in the first act. You know, she, we can see she has a pistol in her drawer and it's explained that, you know, basically she keeps it there because she doesn't want to be mugged in New York, which again was 1975 New York. You know, you, you, would have been wise if everybody was kind of carrying a gun because it was it was a rather dangerous city at the time so anyways so he goes behind like the the locked door but they they do have like badges magnetic badges and then um we kind of see this like it's like a Remind me now of like the AI that are, you know, kind of auto reading books.

And there's something that's kind of like scanning pages of a Chinese book. And then you flip to like this teletype, the old dot matrix printer days. It's kind of doing a live translation, which is not technology that actually existed back then. And then there's like computers. And again, we don't, Everybody has a computer.

Everywhere you turn in my house, there's a computing device someplace. But the 1975 viewer would be like, whoa, they have computers. There is something really going on here. It's the American Historical Society on the outside. They've got technology.

I can't even fathom how that is that is done. And I love that part. And then what I thought was good with the director, he does a very good job of– because, I mean, if you read the plot on Wikipedia, you know everybody in his office is going to get smoked except him. But the director does a very good job of making those characters actually likable in a very short amount of time. You know, you really like his girlfriend.

You like every character you kind of like. And then you're very, to me, at least I was, very upset when they die. The best part, and this is what I think is kind of brilliant, is Robert Redford's director, this very old man. And then you're looking at this actor and you're going, that's a toupee. He's wearing a toupee.

And then he gets killed on some stairs. And then you kind of see in the background, there's his body. And then there's his toupee a couple of flights down. I'm like, that's awesome. But yeah, so I just love that part because it reminds me of what was kind of fun about Mad Men was there was always that kind of like, wow, we used to live like that.

You know, we smoke in an office and, you know, we just would throw our trash out the car window as we drove and people would drink and You know, and the harassment in the office was just expected, you know. And so to me, watching that movie had a bit of a now was sort of like, wow, yeah, remember, we lived like that. And of course, the World Trade Centers, I mean, they're frequently used as, you know, sort of establishing shots. You know, we're in Washington. Nope.

Now we're back to New York World Trade Center. Which is, you know, kind of difficult, I think, to see. Well, and that's, you know, again, we're recording this, you know, right around the time that this movie came out in 1975, but also a couple weeks removed from 25 years, you know, having passed of 9-11. And it is hard to... not think about that when you see the world trade centers in a film. And I believe Cliff Robertson's character is actually in the world trade center.

It works in the world trade center. So, I mean, we're even, I mean, to go even a step further, we're like inside of the world trade center a couple of times. So I want to talk a little bit about Cliff Robertson. What an interesting kind of character, a kind of character that we don't see very often in these kinds of movies. I'm used to seeing the, CIA spook as a cigarette smoking man type not the kind of stoic somewhat like again I want y'all's read of the Cliff Robertson character because I think for me he's the most interesting character in the movie because he's a character we don't see in these kinds of films very often which is the the CIA spook with the heart of gold is what it feels like like he's I don't know how else to put it so I put it to you Carl and then Dr. or the professor what do you guys think of the Cliff Robertson professor character, I guess not what, and professor, you can speak to this as well.

Like, what do we think about the way his character is portrayed in the film? And is this a character that shows up in other kinds of films as well? Yeah. So when I was watching this originally and then rewatching it all these years gone by, I was thinking both of you know that my ideology is I love complexity, nuance, and thoughtfulness. And I weep that we don't have enough of it in our society and our media.

And I was watching this movie and I was thinking, Cliff Robertson's character is all of those things. They made, I think, a very wise decision to eschew what you would expect somebody in that position to be like and made somebody who, he doesn't have a lot, he doesn't have an origin story and like lots of backstory, you know, things that tell you who he is. But I want to tell you who I thought he was and what I thought he stood for, which I think for stuff, movies made today that are about the 70s or the 60s or the 50s, I think they leave this out. During World War II, there was a deep concern that we were fighting these two fanatical empires of Germany and Japan with democracy. which in the 1930s, democracy was seen by many people, not just communists or fascists, but many people were despairing that democracy was just weak as a form of government, as a form of economy, as a form of military.

And they're really, you could argue, one of the reasons Japan and Germany wrongfully thought that they could take on the United States and win was dismissing the decadence of American democracy. But we, the Americans and the Canadians and the British too, and the Australians, we're worried about that. And we've talked about that in some of the shows before about like how that comes out in films of the time where we're going like, geez, you know, how, how does, how does a Canadian boy who was playing base hockey and then suddenly is drafted has to go fight a Japanese soldier or a German soldier who's been raised for the last 10 years to die gloriously, right? The Canadian boy wasn't thinking that way, right?

And so Cliff Robertson, to me, represents that old concern that like, yeah, we're in a democracy and we have rules, but like our enemies get to break all the rules. Like the KGB didn't sit around and like, gosh, you know, should we do this or not? Or like, is this breaking some rule or something? They just did whatever they wanted. They killed whoever they wanted.

They spied on whoever they wanted internally or they spied on themselves. They shot themselves. I mean, what's shown in this movie, you know, the KGB, you look at history of KGB, a lot of purges by the KGB were of KGB, you know, or the previous, the NKPD, previous, you know, the Cheka and whatever. So I think he represents this ambiguity that like, gosh, you know, we're getting our butts kicked in the Cold War. Because remember, we only remember Cold War by the ending, which is like the Soviet Union collapsed.

And for now, they're still in the United States, right? But if you read a history of the intelligence war, the Soviet and Soviet-style agencies like the Stasi of East Germany and the KGB, they consistently won every intelligence battle. I mean, they had Hundreds and hundreds of spies in the United States who were never caught. We just knew they existed, but we never found out who they were. And they probably spent 40 years in government and just retired on a pension.

And so to me, Cliff. Robertson represents this sort of borderland between how do we win this Cold War, which still in the 70s was considered to be vitally important to do, and how do we have any rules at all? And I just thought that was a good character to have. Well, I mean, sort of continuing with that, there's a really nice scene between Cliff Robertson and John Houseman. And John Houseman is kind of the guy at the very top of the CIA.

And so Robertson's talking to John Houseman. And I got to mention, when we talk about John Houseman, in my day, he was known in a commercial for a brokerage firm, and his line was, you know, we make money the old-fashioned way. We earn it. And, you know, people of my age will always be burned in our brains. But anyways, yeah, so he's talking to John Houseman, and I feel like the Cliff Robertson character had not served in anything.

Sorry, coming back to Mad Men, you know, Mad Men was like three generations in that office had served. One, World War II, and the Korean War. And then all the new people that were coming in the office hadn't served. And there was this. Cultural break between them and and same thing with with uh so cliff robertson he's not served and he's talking to a guy who was in world war one and was in world war two and then he says to him he says to him uh you know uh you know do you do you miss that kind of action and then uh houseman responds no i miss that kind of clarity so you know so yeah it's um You kind of feel like Robert said he wishes he was in an environment where he had that kind of moral clarity.

This person is the enemy. I'm allowed to do all these terrible things that person all i can play all the dirty tricks on the germans i want and i feel real good at the end of the day but i don't think his character felt really good about yeah we had to shoot up a whole office of people that just like computers and enjoy sandwiches you know. I do like the idea of the inability to determine who the enemy is now forces us to look inward on ourselves and determine, well, maybe the enemy comes from within. And it's the thing that we have seen, to speak to the 9-11 of it all, if you go and read anything about 9-11, you'll know that 9-11... It's not a conspiracy about the buildings coming down or who did it.

It's more a lack of ability of two organizations to work together to get something done ahead of time to prevent it. That's the problem with 9-11 now, as the information has come out so much longer. As time has gone on, it turns out that it was just like the Challenger. Failing at many levels more than one can only create a problem in an event of that level of significance and awfulness. And that's kind of...

When we look at conspiracies now and someone like the Cliff Robertson character, those people who do the jobs of his character now in real life, in the real world... I think their job must be so much more difficult than, you know, in John Houseman's time. And I think that that is why someone with Cliff Robertson's demeanor in this film is so kind of interesting as a character, because it just you don't see the discerning FBI or CIA agent very often in terms of the upper to mid-level management role. Normally, these are the characters that are talking down to other people and telling them how not good of a job they're doing, or they're in just kind of like a a leadership role a la To Speak to the X-Files, Skinner in that show, or they're shadowy like Cigarette Smoking Man in that show.

But it's interesting because it's almost what you would hope would have happened in real life for those organizations moving forward out of the 70s. Obviously, that's not what happened because something like 9-11 does happen because of organizational problems between two agencies being unable and unwilling to work together, which is just again, it's wild to think about. But this film, I think, kind of preaches an idea of like, you know, this insular behavior and turning on one another. And, you know, well, they maybe figured something out. Possibly.

We don't know. We got to kill them just because. And we'll just, you know, hire somebody from the outside who doesn't have any affiliation with any of this to do it because they'll do it without question. It almost is like, yeah, the Max von Sydow character is not really the villain. He is just the tool through which the villains or villain of the film acts.

And I don't know, I find Max von Sydow's character also very interesting because he's just doing a job. That's it. It's almost like Anton Chigurh with a smile as opposed to a scowl, which I think is, again, he's just doing a job. His job was to get the money back. He couldn't.

He had to kill Josh Brolin to get the money back. I don't know what you want to say. Like, you know, he's got to kill these people. And then he kills the guy at the end of this movie. And he's like, yep, they don't.

I don't have a beef with you at all. So they're not paying me. The contract with him is over. So you're good. Like, oh, OK.

Well, I was going to say, coming back to one of your more original questions about, you know, the Canadian perspective in terms of conspiracies. I mean, we have our nutty ideas here. But Canadian conspiracies tend to stay the same year to year. America wants to take our water. America wants to take our potash.

America wants to take our oil, that kind of thing. America wants to invade us. Whereas when we look down into the States, America is this pendulum. Sometimes the big conspiracy are foreigners. It's the Russians, the commies.

And then the pendulum swings. Oh, no, it's the... people with inside America. They're, you know, the conspiracies about them. And then, you know, five, 10 years later, it swings back to there's somebody else outside of America. So there's always this swing.

And I think for more modern times, right, that the, you know, American conspiracy theories had always been the communists. They're, you know, Red China and Russia, they're out to get us. And this movie is like, no, no, no, the what became known as the deep state right you don't know that the deep state is the conspiracy. And I think that was something that was kind of novel. But I have to talk about, well, first, Robert Redford.

I don't know about kids today, but I always say, back in the 70s, the man your mother dreamed of was not your dad. It was Robert Redford. He was like, him and Paul Newman were like the two sexiest men through the entire 70s. So he's in this movie. And then he has to, you know, obviously get away from the killers.

And he, you know, he goes to a couple of safe houses and finds they've been taken out. And he's got to find someplace else. And so he kidnaps Faye Dunaway. And then, you know, she brings him back to her apartment. And then eventually he kind of ties her up and he's got to go do something else.

And he comes back. And for reasons I cannot understand, other than that she kind of had After he ties her, they make passionate love. Now, first I'm thinking she's been tied up for like four or five hours. She's going to smell like urine. Okay.

So, you know, that's not addressed, you know, but so he makes passionate love to urine soaked, you know, fade on away. I don't know. But then if she just like, you know, she's, had the magical Robert Redford D and she just switches over to his side. And that did made no sense whatsoever. Yeah.

That's interesting because I remember. Please make sense of it for me. Well, it's, it's the saddest, oldest misogynist trope Hollywood has to offer. And, you know, you go back to Hitchcock, 1935, the 39, 39 steps, you know, like I actually remember doing a little module on, um, this in the 90s you know all these hollywood films remember in the 80s and 90s for the first time especially the in the 90s we had no means no like we had to actually point this out like you know 5 000 years of civilization and fine and finally we're saying no means no but In movies, there was still this idea that you'd have the leading man, almost always, assault a woman, do something bad to a woman, but she comes around and falls in love with him by act two.

And that's just so common. I still see it now. I think it needs to die as a motif in Hollywood films. But I think that was my only explanation of what happened there is that Well, he's Robert Redford, and that's what the filmmakers and everyone associated with it thought. I couldn't understand her role in the plot.

Not just, well, Robert Redford has nothing to do for half an hour, but what was she actually doing there? Moving the story forward, except proving Robert Redford can do whatever he wants. Because if they're making a list of villains in this film, he's on the list. Right? If he, like, told the police.

Yeah, and then that guy over there, he kidnapped a woman, you know, beat her, tied her up, kept her against her will for two days. Now, which one was that? It was that guy over there, Robert Redford. What? And then possibly in a quid pro quo situation took advantage.

In my research and the notes for this episode, that's the one thing that I kept looking at is, like, not the the thing to kind of talk about specifically. But the thing that we did need to mention, like the Faye Dunaway of this movie, she is the parallax view doesn't have a love interest the way this movie does. And the parallax view doesn't need one. This movie did not need a love interest like at all. This is a this is a kind of vestigial tale of screenwriting filmmaking that was in the nine.

It was was present, I guess, up until maybe the 90s, but was definitely present in the 70s, which is the lead character needs a love interest and it needs to be someone of note. And there are movies that were coming out. I mean, we could probably go back and forth, you know, tit for tat for five to 10 minutes about movies coming up, probably up until maybe even further than the 90s. I would say in the 2000s and teens, they were stopping to do it somewhat, but it was still there. I guess it probably hasn't completely gone away even now.

But I think that again, like I just think that people's expectations are different. But There was a time and a place where people expected lead characters to have a love interest in the film. And it was kind of, you know, got to give something for the men, the women, the kids. And it's like, you know what? Like, I'm glad that we don't need that anymore because Faye Dunaway is I wouldn't say she's miscast, but her character is given no autonomy of her own.

And to say she has Stockholm syndrome might be being nice. But it is, again, the back and forth between her and Robert Redford is really icky. And it doesn't serve the film at all. And the fact that it's on the poster, front and center of the poster of the film, is wild to me. Because it is barely a part of this movie in terms of... any it's it would be like putting it would be like putting Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen on the poster for Star Wars like it says no bearing on the this that has more bearing on the plot than this does in the plot of this film like she has no bearing on the plot whatsoever it's completely removed from her character and all it does is like you guys both alluded to make Robert Redford really less of a hero than I know he's being meant to be by the people making this film they didn't put that in the film thinking it would be something that would make the character feel kind of off-putting and icky I know that for a fact because in 1975 that was not a thing people thought it just wasn't.

Yeah yeah I mean, how lucky for her, right? But yeah, I mean, yeah, she definitely bolted on. But I recall when they came out with the film adaptation of Hunt for Red October, they're like, where is the romance, the woman character for romance? And like, well, it's just a bunch of dudes on submarines. There's no romance.

And they're like, I don't know if we can make that film. And so they kind of had to have like, um, it was a Gates McFadden kind of at the beginning of the movie, you know, by honey kissing, um, you know, the, the, the, the super spy guy. And, uh, and, and that was it, you know, that was the female character. So, so yeah, so I, I do. And I think I was reading some details about this film and yeah, I mean, fade in a way herself realized that she doesn't serve any purpose in this film, other than to just to be a, you know, uh, you know, the love interest of, of, of, Robert Redford.

And then she kind of pushed to like, I need a little bit more character development. So that's, I think, why they did the whole thing, her photographs and like, you know, why is every... nobody's in your photographs. Why are you so lonely? Or something like that. And I think she pushed for that, but yeah.

Don't you love psychoanalysis by the person who has kidnapped you and beaten you and held you against your will? That's the person I want analyzing me. Yeah, that's like Stockholm Syndrome therapy. Yeah. She does allude to like, You know, like, you know, the nature of her photographs and why they're all so solitary.

She does allude to, like, I will tell you at some point. And I don't even know if she ever really told him or if it were... I have a question. Yeah, yeah. Does she survive the movie?

She does, yeah, yeah. No, because on the internet, that's argued about, that Max von Sydow took care of her. And that's why he's saying... You know, if she had been alive, I would have expected for him to say, why don't you get together with that girl of yours and, you know, or something like that and go hide. But he doesn't say that.

You're right. It's interesting how, you know, the internet fills in and we don't know, of course, but. I mean, on that, too, like, I mean, the movie does end with, like, you know, so Robert Redford, you know, has the files, and then he brings them to the New York Times, and then Max von Snyder, that's where, oh, no, no, no, sorry, Cliff Robertson, kind of his, it's kind of his boss, like, his boss's boss. That's sort of his relation to Robert Redford's character in this CIA hierarchy. And so Robert Redford's like, I've given him the files, you know, you're done for.

And he's like, no, what have you done? We're screwed. You know, this is all out in the open. We can't take over the Middle East oil. We get this out in the open in America. is going to run out of oil and we're doomed.

And our job is to just make sure that, you know, people can put gas in their tank every day and they don't care. They don't care who we kill or what we kill. And knowing, all right, fair enough. But then it ends in a very, I think it's called a girl or the tiger ending where it's like, he gives them the New York times, the papers. And then Clifford Robinson's like, well, what do you do if they don't do a story?

And he's like, well, of course they're going to do a story. I don't know. And then it ends. And you don't really know if the New York Times ever does the big expose. And then, you know, he doesn't have to go to Europe and spend his life like smoking unfiltered cigarettes and eating croissants or something.

What a terrible life that sounds like he would be. I do like the Cliff Robertson at the end where he's, you know, he is having that conversation with Robert Redford. He's like, you know, what do you think is going to happen when the oil runs out? They're going to want us just to go and take it. They're going they're not going to. want us to ask they're gonna want us to just go and impose our will and yeah You know, Cliff Robertson was right like that, that I think that is kind of as time has progressed and as we've seen in the world that we live in, like his character is not wrong.

And that's kind of I think that's the cynicism that's at the center of this movie. And you mentioned it already, Carl, like the idea of like the way the film ends is I mean, it's kind of like Serpico, right? It's like, you know, here it is like they'll do something about it, won't they? And it's like, yeah. I mean, you hope, right?

It's a hope. But we know because of the world that we live in, that hope is sometimes a foolish endeavor. And I do like that the film leaves us at that moment because, you know, you can read the ending however you want. I think that probably the film would err on the side of optimism, I think, just out of the sense that it's an American made film with an American audience in mind. But I do like that they stop one half step shy just to give us that little kind of note to end on which feels very 70s of the film sure yeah I.

Was thinking 70s that the last conclusion the finale is possible disclosure that there's not something after that you know just to update so a television series I liked at least the first season of and I thought it was really well done and it stars Chris Pratt which I I thought he's I think he's a fun comedic actor I just I don't see him he doesn't sell for me very well when he's a ruthless killer, but The Terminalist, which is almost an identical movie, TV series plot. I mean, there's a conspiracy and it comes out, but the conspiracy is like the middle. And then Chris Pratt being this killing machine to get even is the modern way to end the film. And I thought about that. It's like, would you do a film today And, of course, Disclosure Day was that film.

That's why it felt so odd that, like, someone would think, and so we will disclose the truth. Roll credits. And I think in 2026, we expect, like, and? And what else? What's going to happen?

But I guess it was a more innocent time. It's innocent and cynical. What's interesting is that, like, the first thing I will do is take this information to the New York Times, you know, cut, fade to black. Right. Yeah.

But what does happen there? Will they print it and so on? I'm not sure you can end the film like that today. Can you? But besides, unless you're Steven Spielberg.

I mean, that's why people had such a negative reaction to David Fincher's Zodiac was they didn't tell me what happened. It's like, well, but it didn't solve it. Go read. They're still crowing about it on the Internet. 20 years later or however long it's been since Zodiac came out at this point.

Pre-Iron Man coming out. So, like, 2007. So, we're still no further along with having solved that. Like, I think you probably... You would not be able to end this film this way now.

You would have to end it in a different kind of open-ended way that they do things now. Where it would be, you know, like the... I don't know. I think maybe for certain audiences you could, but I don't think you could make a film as mainstream as this one, I think is probably the better way of putting it. You could still make indie and art house films that are completely unintelligible and that are just all over the place even.

And no one is expecting you to, like... We're gonna really kowtow to, like, modern audiences. But if you're making a film with Robert Redford, who is effectively, like... Like you already alluded to, Dr. Perlmutter, one of the big people at the time, if not the biggest...

You know, like you said, Carl, like, good-looking men at the time, like, well-known, recognizable. No, I do not think you could do that with that level of star anymore, because people would be... Unless it's, like, a horror film. But that's about... That's about it.

Like, that's really it. Like, people... I mean, even now, I think Western audiences and I think specifically American audiences want to be sent out on a high note. And this movie is like, you know, half step of a high note. It's two thirds of the way there, three quarters even maybe.

But it yeah, I think now people would be like an unsatisfying ending. Like, duh. You know, I watched Resident Evil over the weekend and people are upset about the ending of that film. Like, I won't spoil it, but they're upset about the ending. And my response is the ending is well earned and it makes perfect sense. but people didn't like it because it's kind of a bummer.

And it's like, so what? It makes narrative sense. And that's the director and film writers intent. Like, okay, sorry, you didn't like it. That doesn't discredit everything that came before it either on top of everything else, which drives me as someone who talks about film nuts, that it's like the ending does not in some cases discredit everything that came before it.

Sometimes it does, but every case that is not true. It is not always the case that a bad ending or an open ending or a, Ambiguous ending ruins the film. If that's the way you feel about it, that's pretty fatalistic in the way you view things. Coming back to the whole pendulum swinging thing, I mean, I think before this movie, say, showing the protagonist shooting an American. government official uh wasn't a good thing to put in a film i don't think audiences really like the idea of the protagonist killing you know american civil servants and and then um And then coming back to when David and I did the podcast and Julie Brennan did the podcast on Disclosure Day. I mean, if you look at like at ET, you know, the bad guys were the FBI.

They are FBI and they are bad guys and bad things can happen to those FBI guys. But then on Disclosure Day, the bad guys are not the FBI. They're just some private corporate security firms. And, you know, disclosure, they couldn't show, you know, American law enforcement being killed as the bad guy. So, you know, another sort of interesting pendulum swinging between can we kill cops in our movie?

No, we can't kill cops in our movie. I don't know. David, someone at your school needs to do a study of that. When is it okay to kill cops in movies? When is it not okay to kill cops in American cinema?

Well, it was part of the Hays Code, as you recall. It was around for a long, long time as the law shall not be defeated. Yeah. Right? So, of course, as I've argued on both of your shows, but especially here on CultureCast, censorship isn't always a bad thing when great artists work within the lines.

Sometimes most of the great art of history has been done under severe restrictions of some kind. And a lot of the great gangster movies got around that by they have the gangster having a high life and successful and killing lots of people and as long as in the last minute he's gunned down and so the law is not defeated, then it obeyed the Hays Code. Yeah, but they were, by the 70s, as Chris mentioned, Serpico was a big deal because, just to remind our younger audience, Serpico was an actual New York City police officer who testified against corruption in the police force, which was endemic at that time in major cities. It was just part of the way of life of having a big institution in a big city, almost anything, especially New York City.

And we were just, every day in the New York Times or the Washington Post, I mean, right now, the cultural telescope, the backwards telescope, where we just look through the big end and see the small thing, pretty much, maybe vaguely, people remember from their high school history textbook, Watergate, right? Maybe that's it, in terms of scandals of the 70s. But there were just so many. And so just my wrap up for this film is that I think it is a tremendously helpful, if you want to understand American history, not necessarily like anything in the film is real, but that you're getting a view of what the culture, especially of paranoia, suspicion, cynicism, lack of faith in every institution. This is when it was really, starting to crystallize and we're still living in the reverberations of that.

Today there was um there was you know so that minutiae i noticed in in this film it it's not relevant of anything but i i made a note and i gotta mention it um the uh there's a there's a scene in a hospital and uh and a nurse is at her desk and she kind of pulls out a novel to read. And, uh, if you, if you kind of, it's very easy to miss, but the, um, the, she, she's reading alien horizons by, uh, a writer named William F. Nolan, which probably doesn't ring any kind of bell whatsoever. But if I said he co-wrote Logan's run, then you're like, Ooh, yeah. So, I was trying to figure out, because a lot of times, especially in TV shows today, you know, a character will be reading a book, and that's always kind of, that's some big hint, you know?

Like, what is that book really hinting at? And I'm trying to think, is there anything about this book that is tied to the movie hinting at anything? And I did some research in the book, and I'm like, you know what? I just think She needs to be reading a book to make it look like she's really not paying attention to the, to the monitors of, you know, the, the heartbeat monitors of the patients. And so probably somebody on, on the, on the, you know, the crew just handed her whatever he was reading here.

Just read this. So that's the only thing I can figure. And then, um, uh, there's a scene all day parking. Chris, you don't live in New York. Do you live in New York?

I do not. Okay. All right. So, yeah. So is it all day parking $ 3.

33? I did a little calculation. That's $ 20 in today's dollars. But I feel you can't park for $ 20 all day in Manhattan. My wife can park all day in Toronto for $ 20, but Toronto's not Manhattan, so I don't know what the average parking rate in Manhattan is.

But yeah, so apparently in 1975, you could park all day for $ 20 in today's dollars. But there was one scene where Robert Redford, he's got a key and he goes to a locksmith and he's trying to get out from him, like, what is this key connected to? You can tell me there's a code on it or something. And the guy who plays the locksmith is an actual locksmith. I guess in the 70s he had a radio show about locks and picking locks and stuff like that.

And so they just grabbed him and then He appears in this movie as himself. I want to mention something that I think we've all kind of talked about now at this point about this film, and that's the way conspiracies used to be. And like you just mentioned, Carl, the way things used to be in New York City. I mean, I can't imagine paying $ 20 to park anywhere in a major American city for a whole day. I know that the last...

Not the last time I was in Chicago, but two times ago, it was $ 30 an hour to park near The Bean in downtown Chicago, which is, I mean, absurd, obviously, but also they're trying to get people that are coming to visit out of town or whatever. Things have changed so much that when we watch films like this film, we can't help but notice the things that have changed in society more than just, oh, the way we talk about conspiracies. But I mean, we... It's wild. We are living in a time so far removed from 1975 that when it was 1975, 50 years before 1975 was 1920.

So, I mean, the people in 1970 looking at 1920 may have felt the same way we do now looking at 50 years later. 50 years ago now. I mean, a little over 50 years now, really. It's weird because the things that have changed are a lot visually, but in terms of socially and culturally, so much has changed as well. And like Dr.

Perlmutter said, it does feel like this movie is right at that cusp of that, of when things are going to change and people are going to be more tuned into things. I mean, I think of the 90s with the X-Files and the paranoia that surrounded the 90s and where that show came out of but Chris Carter has talked about a lot of things that he grew up watching inspiring him to make the X-Files and this was probably one of those things if not in a kind of grand open kind of ended paranoia of those kinds of things that he was seeing in the 70s and It's kind of a bummer that we can't recreate a film like this now in terms of making something like this because conspiracies aren't... I know Dr. Perlmutter said it and Carl said it as well and I'll mention it as well.

There's a conspiracy for everything now. Anything that happens, there is a conspiracy. And that being the case makes... conspiracy theories just at large way less interesting because it used to be kind of its own niche thing. And now that ancient aliens is a thing and it's as popular as anything ever has been, there's ancient alien con. You want to go meet Giorgio Tsoukalos?

You can go do that. Like, that's great. You want to spend your hard-earned money to go meet Dave Childress and Giorgio Tsoukalos and listen to them talk? Cool. I mean, I would if they came anywhere near me, I might take them up on that.

And that's my point. Like, it's it's no longer hiding in kind of the shadows of things anymore. Conspiracy theories and counterculture of that variety is, I think, as popular now as it's ever been. I mean, the 70s was a time when it was like that in terms of mainstream acceptance of the Bermuda Triangle and aliens and stuff like that, you know, in search of the bizarre and things. But we are living in a time now where it feels like To even talk about conspiracy theories is to miss the point that conspiracies don't have to happen in private anymore.

They can just happen out in the open. Literally. In the time we live in now, conspiracies just happen out in the open. And people denying that they're happening feels way worse than a conspiracy to assassinate JFK and all these people were in on it and nobody's ever said anything. Do you know how hard it is to keep people quiet unless you kill them?

It's impossible. That's always... The hard thing with old conspiracies, you know how hard it is to keep people quiet? It's very hard to keep people quiet. And I think that that is willed out now in the world that we live in where everybody having access to a phone and a camera and the ability to post. things to the Internet or get things from the Internet has made what a conspiracy theory or a conspiracy is in general. so different and such a different way.

We have to now, as people who talk about them or watch films that have them in them or things of that nature, we have to kind of approach them differently because the way that the public conversation is being had about them is so different from five years ago, let alone 10, 20, 30, or when this film was coming out, you know, 50 years ago. Carl, when you're not joining me here to talk about movies with... the good old professor, where can people find you and the things that you work on? Yeah, well, I guess, uh, right. So, uh, my conspiracy skeptic podcast, uh, you can find me, you know, on iTunes, the conspiracy skeptic, uh, my website, why rad.com Y R a D.com. I go force forward slash CS conspiracy skeptic.

That's my, my website. Uh, My two books, The Skeptic's Book of Lists and The Conspiracy Skeptic's Book of Lists, those are both on Amazon. I try to earn enough to pay for one oil change a year. I'm getting real close. Year's closing out.

I'm going to get real close. Need an oil change, people. But I'm also going to be coming up with my third book, which would be The Skeptic's Book of Lists 2. Um, yeah. So do you find me and revelant of almost nobody in your audience, but I'm having a hell of a time trying to get press attention for this.

Um, I've started a literary prize in Canada called the KJ Memer award for humor and student journalism. So, uh, kids who are working for the student newspaper can send me their work in the me and my judges. We will find the funniest university newspaper article of the year, uh, and that kid gets $ 1, 000. So I'm self-financing that. But I'm having a hell of a time getting, like, CBC or the Toronto Star to do a story on it.

Like, I think they would do an article about that. But, yeah, you heard it here first, people. Well, we'll do as much as we can to spread the good word, because as someone who was in journalism school in college at the University of Missouri and wrote for the school newspaper, I know that that is— it' s fun— But it's also kind of, you know, it's a little thankless. So, you know, to deal with that. To be able to have somebody to be like, well, you're doing a good job.

Here's some money for the good job you're doing is better than any praise some upperclassmen might give you. I know that much. So as for me, you can find me at weirdingwaymedia.com where all the shows that I work on can be found, including the one that I do with the professor, which is called Required Viewing, which shows up once a week on Thursday on the CultureCast feed. And if you want to hear us talking about films that you should be watching for a multitude of reasons that's where you would go to do it if you want to kick a couple dollars my way patreon.com slash culture cast is where you can do that but like rate and review the show on iTunes and Spotify in that order if you want to money helps but reviews and stuff like that works better word of mouth is still a thing especially in the world of making content where people can't see it Carl thank you so much for joining us this was a lot of fun it's good to talk about a movie that you know Makes me yearn for the days of when conspiracy theories were, quote, fun, unquote.

It is always a joy to be on a podcast you listen to and really enjoy. So thank you for having me on. Well, I appreciate the kind words as well. And we'll catch you on the next episode.