Pakula and Willis explore this disconcerting theme in a series of spectacular setpieces: the slaying of a promising candidate (and eventually, the gunman) atop Seattle's towering Space Needle the Parallax Corporation's attempt to mold Frady into a murderous pawn with a barrage of mindbending agitprop imagery (a famous sequence that has been pilfered countless times) and a carefully staged setup in which yet another pol is gunned down as he rides into a convention center on a golf cart, which then veers off its course and cuts a symbolic swath through an array of dinner tables decked out to resemble the American flag. As Frady ruefully observes, "Every time you turned around, some nut was knockin' off one of the best men in the country." leaders such as John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Shot during the apex of the Watergate era, this existential tale ominously echoes the real-life murders of prominent U.S. The film follows a doggedly determined newspaper reporter, Joe Frady (Warren Beatty), who goes undercover, doubters be damned, to expose the insidious activities of the Parallax Corporation, a covert organization striving to engineer a seismic shift in the power structure of the United States through a series of ruthless political assassinations. Pakula and photographed with considerable panache by Gordon Willis, ASC. Few motion pictures have captured this gnawing sense of suspicion better than The Parallax View , a moody 1974 thriller directed by Alan J.
While The X-Files is the current obsession of armchair conspiracy theorists everywhere, paranoia has long served as an intriguing cinematic subject. Without giving it away, I can only say that it both suggests how such an organization might get away with murder, and how the "unassisted loner" theory of assassination has a persuasive neatness to it.Behind the scenes of the iconic 1974 thriller, photographed by Gordon Willis, ASC. And the ending has an inexorable logic to it. It's a better use of similar material, however, because it tries to entertain instead of staying behind to argue.
#THE PARALLAX VIEW MOVIE#
"The Parallax View" will no doubt remind some reviewers of " Executive Action" (1973), another movie released at about the same time that advanced a conspiracy theory of assassination. And that's a waste, because he doesn't need one-dimensional roles. Is in a steel and glass building that looks somehow totalitarian.īeatty, in the central role, does a fine, taut job, but the movie is so straightforward that it doesn't ever require the superior acting he's capable of plot seems so much more important than character here that it doesn't matter that this is Warren Beatty. There's also an attempt to impose the look of modern American architecture on the movie as a monolithic background the Parallax Corp. And he has a good sense of the incongruous, as in a scene where a senator on a golf cart is killed in an enormous banquet hall, and the cart wanders at random, knocking over tables, until police cars race onto the banquet floor in pursuit. Pakula, works on location to get a nice feel of outdoor menace a lot of the time. The ones with high grades are assassin material.īeatty gets closer and closer to Parallax, despite a series of close calls that might have concerned even James Bond.
The most likely candidates are given an advanced psychological test. They place magazine ads geared to attract a certain personality type: loners, insecure, lacking in self-esteem, in search of authority figures yet resentful of them and capable of murder. Their method has a kind of neat logic to it.
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