WATERGATE spawned its own subgenre of suspense films featuring various arms of the United States government as the hidden masterminds of evil schemes. The first of these post-Watergate films was 1975’s Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford as a CIA researcher (Joe Turner, codename “Condor”) caught up in a dangerous plot. Turner works in a Manhattan CIA-front operation scanning books, newspapers, and magazines for the traces of agency operations. One day he sneaks out to lunch and returns to the office, only to find his colleagues have been assassinated.

Turner realizes he is in danger, phones his Agency contact, follows his directions and soon discovers that this contact is part of the plot. Turner kidnaps and hides out with his victim/love interest (Faye Dunaway) while working to unravel the plot in which he’s been ensnared. He tracks down the assassin who murdered his CIA coworkers and deduces that a rogue element within the agency is undertaking covert operations. This rogue element had hired an assassin to terminate the research office with extreme prejudice because Turner had stumbled onto this rogue group’s plot to invade a Middle Eastern country for oil. The crux of the plot dawns on Turner as a revelation: “Oil fields. Oil. That’s it, isn’t it? This whole damn thing was about oil! Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?”