The Parallax View (1974)

Alan J. Pakula’s adaptation of Loren Singer’s novel – written by the once-in-a-lifetime teaming of David Giler, Lorenzo Semple Jr and an uncredited Robert Towne – is arguably the most paranoid film to spring forth from that most paranoid of decades, the 1970s. A political thriller with a dash of science fiction, it was the middle part of what has become known as Pakula’s “Paranoia Trilogy”, preceded by Klute (1971) and followed by All the President’s Men (1976).

[Before we continue, it is almost impossible to discuss The Parallax View without talking about its ending so take this as your first and only SPOILER WARNING. Proceed with caution…]

Presidential candidate Charles Carroll is assassinated by a waiter at a reception at the top of the Space Needle in Seattle and a congressional committee concludes that the killing was the work of a lone assassin. Three years later, TV news reporter Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) approaches her formed boyfriend newspaper reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) claiming that in the intervening years, six witnesses to the killing have died in mysterious circumstances and as she was covering the event, she believes that her life is now in danger. Initially Frady dismisses her concerns but when Carter does indeed die, apparently in a traffic accident caused by a drug overdose, Frady begins to investigate. After following a trail of clues to the small town of Salmontail, Frady begins to see the outline of a conspiracy, one involving the mysterious Parallax Corporation who are recruiting potential assassins. Using a fake identity, Frady infiltrates Parallax and is subjected to their hi-tech brainwashing process designed to turn him into a pliable killer. But too late Frady realises that Parallax recruits have a very different fate in store and races to prevent another political assassination, this time of Senator George Hammond (Jim Davis).

From its exhilarating opening atop Seattle’s iconic Space Needle to its despairing, bleak finale, The Parallax View takes the viewer down a particularly insidious rabbit hole, into a world where shadowy organisations are even more powerful and ruthless than the governments they seem to be manipulating. As the story progresses there’s a growing sense that Frady was himself being manipulated for much longer than we first thought though exactly when he came under the influence of Parallax isn’t clear. Certainly the minute he adopts the identity of a psychopath, he’s a marked man and when it comes there’s a horrible inevitability about the ending.

Inevitably informed by the Kennedy and Luther King assassinations (Singer’s novel is explicitly about the witnesses to the JFK killings, the film has moved on and it’s the ghost of Bobby who stalks the script) and the then still emerging Watergate scandal (which Pakula examined in All the President’s Men which also featured journalists uncovering terrible hidden truths), The Parallax View was made at a time when all of America’s old certainties were being swept away, public confidence in their governments and institutions undermined by corruption and a naked lust for power, the populace still reeling from the country’s misadventures in South East Asia.

Parallax are interesting villains. The twist in the tale is that they’re not at all interested in actually recruiting assassins but in setting up patsies for their assassinations. Frady was never going to be sent out on a murderous mission – he just needed to be put in the right place at the right time to deflect the finger of suspicion from themselves. His investigative impulses eventually lead to his death, killed and framed by the faceless killers from Parallax, the film’s final sequence being another commission again getting everything completely wrong and Parallax once again being allowed off the hook. We never actually find out who Parallax are, who’s behind them, what their ideology really is nor whether they’re acting autonomously, as a “shadow” government (have they directly influenced the commission that finds that Frady was the killer of Hammond or do they have people installed at the highest levels of government?) or if they are in fact a blunt weapon wielded by paranoid authorities.

Their effect on Frady – and presumably on everyone else who ventures to close to them – is insidious, Frady is hardly the most stable character to begin with, a borderline sociopath with the violent tendencies that he believes Parallax is looking for but as the film progresses he becomes increasingly volatile and paranoid. It’s Parallax’s defence mechanism, to drive anyone who becomes to interested in them nuts, ensuring first that they become so unreliable that no-one would ever believe him, then using him to their own nefarious ends.

It’s a great performance from Beatty, one of his best, playing a character that’s never entirely likeable. He’s dismissive of Lee’s fears, thinking her as paranoid as people will come to think he is later in his investigations, a callous disregard for her that ultimately contributes to her death. Prentiss barely gets any time to register before Parallax get to her though Hume Cronyn is great as Frady’s father-figure editor and William Daniels excellent as the terrified witness on the lam.

Pakula was always a competent and solid director though, despite the multi-award winning All the President’s Men, he was never a particularly outstanding one (he notably didn’t take home the Best Director Oscar he was nominated for on President’s Men) but his work on The Parallax View is among his best. His camera’s frequently maintain a chilly distance from Frady, particularly when he’s out in the open, suggesting that we the audience are a part of the surveillance that we come to realise that he’s been under for some time. He stages two particularly memorable scenes, Frady’s fight with the corrupt sheriff of Salmontail in a creek rapidly being flooded by the opening of a dam’s floodgates and the extraordinary brainwashing sequence. We the audience are again a part of this process – the montage of images and words that bombards Frady is presented as is to the viewers, the film not cutting back to Frady until it’s all over. We’re just as much subjects in Parallax’s training/indoctrination regime as the protagonist. The simplistic coupling the of the words (“Love”, “Mother”, “God”, “Me”, “Happiness”) become increasingly incongruous as the images change from shots of family life through a young couple having sex to Nazi rallies, Vietnam atrocities and Marvel’s Thor. Parallax’s choices perhaps tell us as much about their ideologies as we ever get to know.

There are echoes of that other masterpiece of paranoia, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) from a decade before, but The Parallax View remains very much it’s own film, unlike anything else that was being made at the time. It’s proved divisive over the years, some alienated by its bleakness, by the despairing finale which suggests that ordinary Joe (Frady)s will always be crushed by those in power and the subtle implication that the broken terrified characters Frady meets along the way are in some way analogues for America as a whole, a country reeling from the huge political and social changes that had swept away the golden years of the 1950s. It was a less trusting country now, one less sure of itself. Quoted in Jonathan Kirshner’s Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America, Pakula said that his aim was that “the audience will trust the person sitting next to them a little less by the end of the film” and you’ll certainly find yourself becoming increasingly twitchy as the barest bones of the conspiracy are revealed. The Parallax View is one of the best mainstream American films of the 1970s and today, in a world of fake news, politicians that don’t even try to conceal their lies anymore and unchecked disinformation programmes rolled out across social media it seems more pertinent than ever.