For some reason John Sullivan‘s comment never occured to me until I read it a few hours ago.
Sullivan: “Max Von Sydow, Tina Chen and Hank Garrett are amazing in that opening office-murder scene, but one little thing has always bugged me.
“Why would Von Sydow’s assassin team pick lunch hour as the time to make the hit? Why wouldn’t they have done it at least an hour or two earlier once they realized everyone was there except the one guy who called in sick?”
Answer: If Robert Redford‘s “Turner” character hadn’t snuck out the back way in order to pick up lunch orders and discuss Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at a local diner, he would have been killed alng with the others. Von Sydow knew that without Turner being absent there would be no movie, so he had to choose lunch hour.
Another excellent point from Steven Kar: “The Redford-Dunaway romance wasn’t totally believable because it didn’t have time to develop. The only reason audiences (and Dunaway’s character) accepted it and got on board was because the paranoid, crazy guy who kidnapped her, held her hostage, and put her life in danger looked like a 38-year-old Robert Redford.”