Robert Redford's Perfect Marvel Movie Flipped The Script On One Underrated Spy Flick

The legendary Robert Redford has sadly passed away. His legacy, however, is secure. From classic films like Barefoot in the Park to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, there’s not really a shortage of Redford bangers, each of which represents some facet of his unlimited talent. But, for genre fans, and perhaps Marvel fans in specific, many will note that his last feature film ever was a brief cameo in Avengers: Endgame, in which he reprised his role as Alexander Pierce, one of the higher-ups at S.H.I.E.L.D. The Endgame moment was very brief because the real movie in which Redford plays Pierce is Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which remains not only one of the most consequential Marvel movies in the saga but also holds up today as a solid superhero spy flick.

Interestingly, one of the greatest twists that Redford pulls off in The Winter Soldier is a kind of inversion of his role in the 1975 spy thriller, Three Days of the Condor. In fact, watching these two movies back-to-back makes for an excellent mini-Redford binge, and a great study in how a gritty 1970s spy movie perfectly translated into a solid Marvel movie.

Spoilers ahead.

Based on the novel Six Days of the Condor by James Grady, Three Days of the Condor follows Redford as a CIA analyst named Joe Turner, whose codename is “Condor.” If that makes him sound badass, don’t be fooled. Condor’s job is to leaf through books and to see if events in certain books match up with real-world geopolitical threats or terror attacks. This makes Condor kind of a bookish nerd, which is a great setup for what comes next.

After all of Condor’s colleagues are slain, he’s forced to go underground because it seems that his own country is trying to both frame him and take him out. This desperation eventually pairs him with an innocent bystander, Kathy Hale, played brilliantly by Faye Dunaway. The ultimate thematic point of the film all comes down to Condor’s realization that the CIA is trying to off him for discovering some data he shouldn’t know about. The very people who should be on his side are, in fact, his enemies. Condor faces down against an assassin named Joubert (Max von Sydow) as well as the head of the CIA, a corrupt director named Atwood (Addison Powell).

This plot is, more or less, replicated in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, although the details are somewhat different. Like Condor in Three Days of the Condor, Captain America/Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) are operating under the assumption that the people he works for — in this case, S.H.I.E.L.D. — are the good guys, and his boss, Alexander Pierce (Redford), has everyone’s best interests at heart.

But the twist in Winter Soldier is that Pierce is the bad guy, a mastermind who is willing to sacrifice millions of innocent lives to keep his security program running. Essentially, in Winter Soldier, Cap and Fury are Condor, and Redford plays a baddie like Atwood. Instead of being the hapless hero with the heart of gold, Redford flipped the script and took on the role of the shadowy spymaster, his character’s enemy in Three Days of the Condor.

So, while it might seem strange, or even sad, that Redford’s last big movie credit was in a Marvel movie, that character, as originated in Winter Soldier, has deep roots. And, when you watch Three Days of the Condor, you’ll realize just how shocking Redford’s turn in The Winter Soldier really is. And, you’ll be reminded that this twist also proves that Robert Redford, as an actor, had an incredible range.

Three Days of the Condor is streaming on MGM+. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is streaming on Disney+.