“Condor” had something that the earlier films did not: a strong female lead in Faye Dunaway.īut even “Condor” didn’t elevate the female lead into the kind of role that modern-day thrillers routinely do. In some ways, “Three Days of the Condor” is the prototype for the political thrillers we regularly see offered on our streaming services today. Only a couple of years later, Pakula directed what is perhaps the best and most realistic (for good reason) political thriller of all time, “All the President’s Men.”īetween “Parallax” and “All the President’s Men” came director Sydney Pollack’s classic political thriller “Three Days of the Condor.” Pakula released a classic political thriller, “The Parallax View,” about a journalist (Warren Beatty) who discovers a political plot following the assassination of a presidential candidate. Director John Frankenheimer brings much of the same realistic detail and nerve-wracking tension as he had two years earlier in his better-known film “The Manchurian Candidate.” Lancaster’s general schemes to stage a coup against the president, played by Frederic March, for being too soft on Russia.

Sometimes they play out like stark stage dramas: In 1964, “Seven Days in May” cast a coldly calculating general (played by Burt Lancaster) against another military man (Kirk Douglas) with the fate of democracy in the United States in play. (The fictional kind, that is.) In the past 60 years, there’s a long list of great thrillers with a political bent. We’re lucky to live in an age of political thrillers. It’s hard not to read some of the characteristics of any romantic relationship into “The Diplomat,” and it often seems like a play on the marriage of Hillary and Bill Clinton: She’s tough as nails, he’s smooth as silk - and trust issues abound.

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