John Houseman Three Days of the Condor (1975)
John Houseman (September 22, 1902 – October 31, 1988) played Mr. Wabash, the senior CIA official who arrives from Washington to manage the crisis, in Three Days of the Condor (1975). The role drew on the persona Houseman had established in The Paper Chase (1973), for which he had won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar two years earlier.
Wabash is the institution remembering when it had clearer rules
Wabash appears in two scenes. He is the institutional memory of the CIA — a man who served in the OSS during World War II and who privately doubts what the agency has become. His exchange with Higgins about ordering Turner's elimination is the film's masterpiece of bureaucratic indirection: Wabash never says "kill him." He asks whether anything stands in the way.
"Wabash is the most chilling character in the film because he is the most polite. He has the manners of an Edwardian club steward and the authority of a man who can have you erased between courses." — David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2014) (book, not available online)
Houseman's casting was deliberate. Pollack wanted an actor whose voice and bearing would make the order feel like an old tradition rather than a new outrage.
"John could say 'There is nothing in the way of your doing this, is there?' and make it sound like a question about the wine list. That was exactly what we needed." — Sydney Pollack, Cinephilia & Beyond
The OSS reference — Wabash recalling sailing the Adriatic with a movie star at the helm (Sterling Hayden, an actual OSS operative) — was added to the script specifically to give Houseman material that drew on his own pre-Hollywood life as a co-founder of the Mercury Theatre with Orson Welles and a wartime radio propagandist.
Houseman came to acting late and to stardom later
Houseman was a producer, director, and writer for forty years before he became known as an actor. He produced Citizen Kane (1941) with Welles, ran the Voice of America's overseas broadcasting during World War II, produced for MGM in the late 1940s, and ran the drama division at Juilliard from 1968. His acting career began in earnest at age seventy with The Paper Chase (1973), in which he played the imperious Professor Kingsfield. The role won him an Oscar and reframed his identity for the rest of his life.
"I was an old man playing an old man, which is the easiest acting in the world. I had been waiting to play him for fifty years." — John Houseman, Front and Center (1979) (memoir, not available online)
The Wabash role two years later refined the same persona: white hair, perfect tailoring, a voice that could deliver a euphemism for murder without raising the temperature of the room.
Selected filmography
| Year | Film | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1941 | Citizen Kane | Producer (uncredited collaborator with Welles) |
| 1952 | The Bad and the Beautiful | Producer |
| 1955 | Julius Caesar | Producer |
| 1973 | The Paper Chase | Best Supporting Actor Oscar |
| 1975 | Three Days of the Condor | Mr. Wabash |
| 1975 | Rollerball | Bartholomew |
| 1977 | The Cheap Detective | |
| 1977 | Smith Barney commercials | "They make money the old-fashioned way" |
| 1980 | The Fog | John Carpenter |
| 1984 | The Naked Face | |
| 1988 | Another Woman | Woody Allen |