Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Mission Impossible, the movie, kind of ripped this off didn't it? Right down to the phone booth scene. Of course the ending was different. Yeah, anyway, I first caught this one on AMC on a rainy day with my mom back in the 90s. One of those flicking through the channels and nothing is on kind of days, and looking out the window and you can't really go outside and then..."Oh you'll like this." And the 13 year old me thought it was the coolest most paranoid thing that I'd ever seen. And, now the 40 year old me thinks it's the coolest and most paranoid thing that I've ever seen. Paranoid is really the only way to describe it. And the paranoia is doubled with Redford's character who is a spook, but not the James Bond kind. He's more the every day low level paper pusher kind of spook, not the kiss kiss bang bang spook. He's not sure what he's doing, he's never been in this situation before and you can feel his stress from start to finish. And, for those of you that read the book (also as good) this is spawned departments in both the KGB and then later the CIA that were simply based on Redford's job made up by the author. It literally didn't exist before the film. This is really the perfect spy movie. Everything that came before it and everything that followed it seem like a hollow shell in the genre.