The Parallax View (1974)

I don't know how to start this review of the second installment in Alan J. Pakula's virtuoso Paranoia Trilogy. I guess I'll start at the beginning. The brooding realism of the beginning is arranged with a keen sense of the vertical. The camera divulges Seattle's Space Needle tower behind a totem pole, where an assassination goes down amidst Independence Day pomp. A committee of officials, constrained by the frame, proclaims the lack of evidence of a wider conspiracy, yet these are Watergate times, and Alan J. Pakula marshals his investigation as a compulsory act of "irresponsible speculation." Gordon Willis' cinematography twists the menacing from the everyday with unreserved harshness: Overwhelming architecture, the bomb warning scrawled on a napkin, one character's last cup of coffee. All of the decade's political misgivings and introspection is concentrated into the merciless culmination, with Yankee Doodle trumpeting in the bare hall while unpleasant transactions imbue the catwalks above, a country awakening to methodical obscurity and transparency alike.

What happens to our muck-raking protagonist splinters the movie's straightforward standards and leaves the final 40 minutes or so as the most transcendent, impressionistic illustration of paranoia, not as a psychosomatic condition but more like the belief in it as an idea, that I've ever seen. The first half of Pakula's anamorphically shot impressionistic thriller is about paranoia, the second is paranoia. The movie is not that suspenseful. A lot of times, Beatty's escape from danger seems remarkably effortless, and his way of being recruited by the Parallax Corporation is less an obstacle than a convenient turning of the page to the recruitment itself. The movie is not about suspense. It's about mood and atmosphere. And when something malevolent happens, the suspense is diffused in favor of creeping through this dark, kitchen-sink world governed by power, fear and indoctrination.

Another thing at which Pakula excels, and at which he reached an indelible peak in All the President's Men, is demonstrated consistently throughout The Parallax View. People talk so very quietly in his movies. And if you think about it, if you're this scared all the time, there's no reason to talk any louder than that. And when Paula Prentiss, an estranged fellow journalist of Beatty's who believes someone is trying to kill her, does raise her voice early on in a scene she makes terrifying with a brilliant performance, it's not only rage and fear, our ears are racked with a profound desperation to escape from a silence that's turned lethal. Later, someone else will talk to Beatty, and he will say, "Who are you?" He will be so tranquil and tenderly quiet when he says it.

The evolution is realized through what I sincerely consider to be one of the very central sequences in American cinema in the 1970s, Pakula's virtuoso showpiece of Kuleshov-style perception, the indoctrination slideshow, a celestial event of imagery and keywords shot through the viewer's brains. I could describe further, but the account would be dull and futile. It's simply a conquest of film language in a way that confounds textual explanation. Beholden in no insignificant portion to the Soviet montage theory, in which solitary snippets of imagery are given implication due to the images flanking it, this is shown to us from a character's precise point-of-view. We've become him, and are undergoing exa

Fmovies: In the early 1970's, distrust of the government was widespread. "The Parallax View" was one of the movies that reflected this.* Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) is a reporter who one day is covering a candidate's campaign, when the candidate is assassinated. A governmental committee concludes that there was no conspiracy. However, within three years, Joe is the only witness still alive. As he tries to investigate further, he finds himself on the run.

I'm guessing that the central idea was loosely based on the Kennedy assassination. Director Alan J. Pakula sets every scene so as to maintain a sense of impending doom. You may be uncertain as to whom you can trust after watching this movie. It's that well done. It just goes to show that the world's real horrors aren't supernatural at all.

*Others include "Three Days of the Condor" and "All the President's Men".

In the age of conspiracy, there are dozen of reasons why bad things happen to good people. They never happen to bad people, they are protected. Lincoln, Kennedy, Luthor King and even Bobby Kennedy, all were targeted for death by their enemies. Bush, Nixon or even pedophile priests, all have guardian angels. This movie is called " The Parallax View " which offers a plausible suggestion of how such powerful organizations work. Warren Beatty plays Joseph Frady, a top notch reporter who discovers a mounting pile of evidence, all which indicates a U.S. Senator was not assassinated by a lone gunman. However, as he begins collecting both the name of witnesses and collaborating evidence to substantiate his conclusions, he become the primary target of the Paraallax corporation. With Williams Daniels and Hume Cronyn in supporting roles, this strange and compelling film urges the audience to try and stay ahead of the assassins. Base on the David Giler novel and aptly directed by Alan J. Pakula this movie is driven by suspense and fueled by circumstance. From the very beginning, the audience is drawn ever forward with the hero and we hope he will get to the exit door before the Parallax crew prevents him. An exciting and heart pounding ending awaiting anyone paying attention and riveted to their chair. Superior film for Warren Beatty and one destined to become a Classic. ****

The Parallax View fmovies. It has become commonplace to identify '70s Hollywood films as their own genre. I'll go one farther and identify this era as a collective, structural autuer.

If that hypothesis holds any water, this is one of its impressive works. Made shortly after Watergate, and less than a decade after the JFK assassination, this envisions conspiracies and assassinations not as a disruption of, but a cornerstone of the American establishment.

This is, in a sense, not a POLITICAL conspiracy thriller. The US government, or that of any other country, is presented as merely a dope of a greater power- that of the big corporations of whatever stripe. This is a dystopian capitalist democracy- one in which representatives are elected to "officially" be as clueless as the general populace about the real social reality around them.

Perhaps the most subversive thing about this very subversive film is that the assassinations don't seem catastrophic, or even troubling. When one takes place, the victim politician is basically a walking sound bite. His sacrifice seems only the continuation of a ritual of banal brutality.

In one scene, a film is shown that is supposed to condition the viewer to murderous obedience. It is a montage of images of Americana, including those of violence and oppression. In most '70s conspiracy thrillers, the evil that lurked beneath the surface had a predatory relation to the commonly understood reality. People were putting their trust in a machine that was not what it seemed. Here, the evil is the surface. America IS the conspiracy.

DP Gordon Willis has never impressed me more. In his work with Woody Allen and Francis Coppola his show-offy use of shadow and in-the-frame lighting sources seemed at times to distract from the tone or theme of the film, as if Willis was only interested in defining his "look" regardless of its relation to the film's content. Here, it fits the tone of the film perfectly. The final scenes, largely devoid of dialog, in a hall filled with terrifyingly "patriotic" imagery, is gorgeous. Many of the shots reminded me of de Cherico paintings.

PARALLAX VIEW is an impressive political thriller with an unusually specific and scary viewpoint. It posits that many conspiracies work because relatively few people are in on the whole joke; some are involved in the set up, some in the telling, and some in the punchline, but only a precious few are given the whole picture, making detection almost impossible. The argument is compellingly made.

It is the perfectly machine-tooled "punchline" role the Powers That Be assign to an unwitting Warren Beatty that makes PARALLAX VIEW such a frightening movie. There seems to be a thread running through many of the bigger conspiracy movies (see ARLINGTON ROAD, ROLLERBALL, NETWORK, THE INSIDER, etc.) that suggests unless the individual can find an inroad to make themselves useful to the system, the system finds a role for individual (often not to his liking). In the case of NETWORK, individual Howard Beal is initially spared by one geopolitical phase of the corporate system and allowed continue to rant on TV once he is properly slotted by Ned Beatty, but he is ultimately murdered when the corporate television arm of the system no longer has a use for his declining ratings. He becomes a punchline.

In THE INSIDER, Russell Crowe is initially hung out to dry by the system until Al Pacino is able to find a way to manipulate the television arm of the system to find a value for Crowe. Crowe becomes the instrument of the telling.

In ROLLERBALL, James Caan is beloved by part of the system as the greatest celebrity sports figure of his time, but ultimately sabotaged by another part of the corporate world which is trying to espouse the notion in the game that the individual can never beat the system, something Caan has been indirectly doing by being too successful in the game. Caan successfully defeats the setup, telling and punchline (though he's probably not long for this world.)

In the case of Warren Beatty in the PARALLAX VIEW, he is elected to take the fall for a political assassination which will simultaneously discredit his own conspiracy investigations. The task is accomplished with such cold blooded efficiency and clever precision, one has to seriously doubt whether our own Federal government could do it. But then, is that perceived incompetence of our officials just another con being perpetrated on us by "Them"? Beatty's mistake is that he underestimates "the set-up" and becomes the posterchild of the system's "punchline."

It is in this battle between individual and system that THE PARALLAX VIEW really distinguishes itself. What initially appears to be the ambiguous paranoia of a decidedly neurotic woman is gradually allowed to organically grow such that we can begin to see tips of the iceberg along the way, but don't want to believe what we're seeing even when the truth is apparent. That iceberg subtly floats by in different forms every time Beatty investigates further or reexamines his own position, yet remains nearly invisible possibly because it is so big it cannot be seen or contemplated?

Certainly there are aspects which lurch toward absurdity. For instance, the non-fallout from the cartoonish bomb explosion of Beatty's plane (containing an important political official no less) certainly should have aroused greater attention and suspicion. A car chase about 2/3rds of the way through feels particularly tacked-on. However, the overall focus of this movie, which is the slow peeling back of the layers to get to the irresistible m

The late Alan J. Pakula's 1974 film about political murders is a superbly crafted thriller that holds the audience in its quiet, unsettling grip.

Warren Beatty gives his character of Joe Frady, a "third-rate" journalist, just the right balance of recklessness and determination to enable one to have faith in this man to uncover such shady, potentially threatening goings-on.

Beatty is ably backed up by the supporting cast, most notably Hume Cronyn as Frady's editor, and Paula Prentiss and William Daniels as, respectively, a television reporter and columnist both in fear for their lives.

Composer Michael Small's main theme (used at strategic points throughout the film and often playing on the traditional patriotic sound of the trumpet) has a quality both mournful and despairing that relates effectively to what we are watching. It is a rather sparse music score, but this seems to add to its power. Gordon Willis's Panavision photography conveys threat in even the most everyday of locations (his rendering of modern architecture is especially strong in suggesting a faceless, omnipotent threat), while the editing rhythms and sound design contribute a great deal in throwing the audience off-balance.

Pakula has been involved in more widely-known projects such as All The President's Men and Presumed Innocent, but The Parallax View is definitely one of his best and most powerful films.