Faye Dunaway’s in bed. Robert Redford, as Joe Turner, has forced Dunaway’s Kathy Hale into her cramped Brooklyn Heights apartment. He’s troubled; as he was out picking up lunch, six of his CIA colleagues were murdered, and his boss has been implicated. Now, branded with the obscure code name “Condor,” he’s on the run. In a crawling panic, Turner explains the absurdity of the situation to Hale, whom he’s taken hostage. She’s suspicious, fearful. I just read books, he says to her, his exasperation palpable. I’m not a spy. We read everything that’s published in the word, and we feed the plots, dirty tricks, codes, into a computer and the computer checks against actual CIA plans and operations. He’s desperate: who’d want him killed? Neither has the answer. He needs to know what’s happening, now. Here’s the 20th Century moment:

Turner: What time does the news go on?
Hale: Six o’clock.
Turner (sighing): Forty minutes.

He considers the silence, stands, and moves toward Hale as the mood in the room shifts from dusk to dark. He holds her by her arm and leads her the few steps toward her bed. Her apartment is small; the presence of the bed in the room was already vaguely indecent. C’mere, he says. She cries, No, please. He stretches out next to her in her bed, but not before cocking her arms behind her head, securing her, hovering over her, their faces close, strangely intimate. I am tired, he says. I’ve got to close my eyes for a while…. If you try and move or climb off the bed, I’ll know it, I’ll feel it, and I promise you I’ll hurt you. Terror pulses beneath Dunaway’s beauty. I believe what you told me, she says quietly, bargaining. No, you don’t, he says, a clock in the room ticking loudly, their soundtrack. I don’t know if I do.

That afternoon, Turner and Hale endure forty minutes as they wait for the news to come on, something that’s virtually unimaginable to us now. The time that Turner and Hale spend together was time created, time necessitated, by waiting. They lie next to each other and the clock hands move and loosen something between them. (A draft of the Three Days Of The Condor screenplay closes out the scene this way: “CAMERA PUSHES CLOSER ON KATHY. She stares at Turner whose eyes are closed. It is a strange kind of violence.”) Redford and Dunaway are wary of each other, both plotting mental moves, getting off on the tension. It’s genuinely erotic, their pas de deux among fear, suspicion, and helplessness. In the 21st Century, forty minutes is a slice that barely registers among times zones rendered obsolete. In 1975 forty minutes was a forced, inescapable interval, and obeying the clock’s autocracy, Turner is obliged to fill in, to adapt within tense circumstances. He ends up in bed with Faye Dunaway.

Today, Turner and Hale wouldn’t have had to press against each other, fighting exhaustion and fear against the slow, indifferent sprawl of time. His gesture now: scrolling on his phone, checking local news apps, texts. (Does the clock exist?) Turner wouldn’t sit down now, let alone be forced to; he’d be off into the future for which he no longer needs to wait. The scene between them always feels longer than it is in real time. It’s only a couple of minutes, but the minutes elongate lazily, sensually. Turner looks around the room, catches his breath, gets his bearings, decides to lead Hale to bed in an act of pure self-defense that opens out, eventually, slowly, to communion. The friction between the immediacy of his anxiety and the deliberate, unwanted delay emphasizes the tension, but also creates the smooth, soft spot where he and Hale eventually reckon with each other, in their own way, in their waiting. Delayed, they become intimate. Time insists.

In the early 1990s I tracked down an album that I’d been coveting for years, Live At The Button by Charlie Pickett and the Eggs. I’d searched record stores from coast to coast; I’d asked friends of friends. Finally, I took out an ad in the back pages of Goldmine magazine requesting the album, or a copy of it. Weeks later, a record store owner in southern Florida got in touch with me via snail mail and offered me the album, which arrived, weeks later. This period of time—a stretch that recalled the agonizing “four-to six weeks” we all endured in childhood waiting for something to arrive in the mail—torqued my anticipation. And the payoff was sweet. A decade later, well into the Internet era, I was living briefly in New York for a summer’s month, and happily for me the New York Times was serializing The Great Gatsby on Sunday’s in the Book Review.

The wait between reading each chapter allowed Jay and Nick and Daisy, whom I already knew absurdly well, to move again inside my imagination, and against the backdrop of the Brooklyn and Manhattan streets I was walking everyday, with new vividness. Best of all, Fitzgerald’s story felt as if it were unfolding in real time. Each Sunday, after contemplative absence, I caught up with the characters, I reinvested. iTunes and Kindle, remarkable in their speed of connectivity, refuse us this enforced idleness. More accurately, we refuse ourselves this lingering in time, deny the erotics of stillness, more wired to the pornography of now.

I don’t own a copy of Three Days Of The Condor. I recalled my favorite moments so well that I never really needed it, but I wanted to rewatch the Turner/Hale scene, so I searched YouTube for clips. Not much there, the trailer and various excerpts, including 47 seconds of the “I just read books” dialogue (cutting off, inexplicably, before Turner and Hale reach bed). I looked for streaming versions of the film on Hulu and elsewhere. Nothing. I remembered Netflix, logged in, added the film to my queue, clicked Play. Our apologies—streaming is not supported for your operating system. To watch instantly, you'll need a computer that meets the following minimum requirements: an Intel-based Mac with OS 10.4.8 or later; Safari 3 or higher; or Firefox 2 or higher; 1 GB RAM.

But I have the minimum requirements. I want to watch instantly. My irritation grows. Do I really have to wait for them to ship this? I try Netflix on my iPhone. Within moments I’m watching Redford and Dunaway in bed, waiting for their time to come. I bring the phone into the next room, where Amy’s working. I idle, impatient. She’s busy. Look at this, I say finally.