The Parallax View
ALAN J. PAKULA was the master of paranoia. Between 1971 and 1976, he directed three thematically rich and stylish psychological thrillers, each dealing with differing aspects of politics, the abuse of power and surveillance. Dubbed the ‘Paranoia Trilogy’, it began with Klute, which starred an Oscar-winning Jane Fonda as a Manhattan call girl in the crosshairs of a killer, and concluded with All The President’s Men, which chronicled The Washington Post’s investigation into the Watergate scandal, and won four Academy Awards.
In-between came The Parallax View, arguably the pick of an exceptional bunch. Loosely based on the novel by former OSS operative Loren Singer, the film follows newspaper reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) as he investigates the deaths of several witnesses to a political assassination. Initially set to be directed by Downhill Racer’s Michael Ritchie, the script, by Lorenzo Semple Jr, of Three Days Of The Condor fame, eventually found its way to actor/ producer Warren Beatty, whose star power had lost some of its allure after a run of box-office misfires. Beatty had taken the previous two years off to help with his friend George Mcgovern’s unsuccessful 1972 Presidential campaign and saw Parallax as his comeback, bringing it to Pakula, then riding high on the success of Klute.
America in the early ’70s was a nation in crisis. Watergate, the ongoing Vietnam war — not to mention the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Bobby, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X — had all but eroded people’s trust in the government and judiciary. For Pakula, The Parallax View allowed him to address these very real fears within a fictional set-up, working first with David Giler (later co-writer of Alien) to rework Semple Jr’s script, before Beatty drafted in Chinatown scribe and renowned script doctor Robert Towne. But a Writers Guild strike meant the screenplay was never finished, so Pakula took over scripting duties himself, rewriting and adding scenes during production.
The Parallax View begins at an Independence Day parade in Seattle. There we meet Frady, as he’s denied access to a reception at the top of the Space Needle, where independent senator Charles Carroll (Bill Joyce) is gunned down, before his supposed assassin is cornered on the roof, falling to his death, in a scene reminiscent of the climax of North By Northwest — one of many nods to Hitchcock in the film. A congressional committee declares the senator’s death to be the work of a lone gunman and not some wider conspiracy, although we know otherwise.
Three years later, Frady is scraping a living as a crime journalist, when an old flame, TV reporter Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), shows up at his motel room, petrified. Six witnesses to Carroll’s assassination have mysteriously died and Lee, who was there that fateful day, is convinced she’s next. Frady is dismissive, so Pakula hard-cuts to her corpse, in the morgue. As the camera pulls
back, a shocked Frady can be seen standing next to her body, now very much a believer.
Following a lead to a small town, Frady comes across a questionnaire for the Parallax Corporation, a sinister organisation recruiting assassins from America’s endless supply of malcontents, particularly those with violent tendencies, then supplying them to big business or political parties. After the sole surviving witness to Carroll’s murder is blown up on his yacht, Frady fakes his own death, adopting the alias of “hostile misfit” Richard Paley in order to infiltrate Parallax, unaware he’s being set up as the patsy in another senatorial killing. Part of his induction involves a four-and-a-half-minute montage of repeated words and images that took months to cut together, with Pakula staging the scene so the audience watches the film as Frady does. Although, neither he (nor we) ever discover who’s pulling the strings at the company. Their identities remain as mysterious as their motives.
So far, so conspiratorial. What differentiates The Parallax View from other, lesser thrillers is its innovative look and bold editing. Anxiety and paranoia permeate almost every scene. The tense, protracted sequence in which Frady follows a suspect to the airport before boarding a plane, only to realise there’s a US senator in first class and a bomb in the cargo hold, is a masterclass in visual storytelling. Working for the second time with cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather), Pakula uses ominous angles, a voyeuristic camera, and breathtaking widescreen photography, as well as long takes and extended, dialogue-free stretches, to create a pervasive air of unease, mistrust and menace, frequently sequestering his characters against a dominating, often abstract, architectural backdrop, or else shooting them from behind.
Dubbed the “prince of darkness” after his fondness for filling the frame with deep shadow, Willis, reputedly, thought Beatty somewhat limited as an actor, and so, for the pivotal scene in which Paley “confesses” to a Parallax operative that he’s a flasher, Willis hides him in the black. Watching dailies the next day, the story goes, Beatty was not happy — Willis claimed he was almost fired as a result — but the schedule was so tight, they couldn’t reshoot, and the scene stayed.
When The Parallax View was released in June 1974, reviews were mostly positive. “Pakula’s best film,” enthused New York magazine. Not everyone was as impressed. “A movie of splendid bits and pieces disappointingly strung together,” dismissed The Village Voice. The film’s commercial impact was similarly disappointing. But what’s perhaps even more astonishing, in retrospect, is the fact it was was completely snubbed by the Oscars. Fortunately for Pakula, Robert Redford was a fan and offered him the job of directing All The President’s Men.
Forty-four years on, with American politics going through another tumultuous period, The Parallax View feels even more prescient than ever. Pakula, who died in a car accident in 1998, directed 11 films after his Paranoia Trilogy, but none had the power, pessimism nor downbeat dénouement of The Parallax View which, as one writer noted, was not just a movie about paranoia, but a deeply paranoid film.
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