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I saw this film first some twenty years ago and loved it. I saw it again this week and found the film superior to most other films of director Pakula and found it to be another gem from cinematographer Gordon Willis.

"Parallax View" never won Oscars or other major awards for Pakula but this film along with "Klute" and "Sophie's Choice" are his finest works. Articles on Pakula often focus on his award-winning work and neglect this fine movie.

What was great in this film that was missing in "All the president's men" or "The pelican brief"? Here the element of existentialism sucked in the viewer to participate in the whirlpool of deceit, exemplified most by the test given to the lead character in the offices of Parallax Corporation, the staccato editing (John Wheeler) that exemplifies the individual's helplessness, and the imaginative photography (Willis) that stunts the individual (not crowds) against the himalayan landscapes of glass and steel.

The film was made at a time when Hollywood was brimming with great films with a similar line of thought (Spielberg's "Duel", Coppola's "The Conversation", Penn's "Night Moves", Polanski's "Chinatown", Antonionni's "Zabriskie Point", Altman's "Nashville", Boorman's "Point Blank", etc.) internalizing the external, as Camus would have best described it. "Parallax View" among all these films touched the subject of politics using the least obscure metaphors and similies.

Can one forget the dead calm in the sea before the explosion/assasination? Or the assassination viewed from the roof top of the victim's cart colliding with empty tables and chairs towards the end of the film? None of Pakula's other films have such hardhitting scenes as these, even if one were to discount the unconvincing cool response of the lead character in the airplane when he realizes that there is a live bomb on it.

This is a film that grips you nearly 30 years after it was made, when US politics seems to be at a point very close to what the film depicted three decades ago.

"The Parallax View" belongs to one of my favorite movie genres -- the paranoid 1970s political thriller. Cashing in on a decade of assassinations and government corruption, the film stars Warren Beatty as a journalist who infiltrates a shadowy organization that's training people who fit certain psychological profiles to become assassins of political figures. It's got a satisfying, eerie vibe and pretty accomplished direction from Alan J. Pakula, who certainly knew his way around a thriller with political overtones. Gordon Willis's deservedly lauded cinematography goes a long way to making the film work, using lighting and framing to create oppressive and sinister compositions. The editing is a bit ragged in spots, resulting in abrupt transitions that can be disorienting. And I'll admit that toward the end I sort of lost the thread of what was going on. But overall this was an entertaining if maybe minor contribution to the world of disaffected 1970s cinema.

Grade: A-

A US Senator is assassinated and the official inquiry concludes it was the work of a lone gunman. Three years later, with 6 witnesses dead, a TV reporter present at the killing is frightened for her life. She takes her fears to a journalist ex-boyfriend. At first he is sceptical...

Brilliant paranoid thriller from Pakula, utilising choppy realism and naturalistic dialogue to create a bleak and uncompromising picture of cynical, corporate conspiracy within US politics. Beatty has never been better as the ambitious journo-hack Joe Frady, and he is superbly supported by Cronyn, Daniels and a deeply compelling cameo from Prentiss. You can bet this wasn't diluted by audience testing prior to release... unmissable.

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 mystery, is highly effective. People can judge for themselves whether any of the dirty tricks this movie documents really go on, but that's really not the point.

This is a story full of intriguing moves and clever counter-moves. Scams and ploys and scams inside of ploys. Most of these details are fascinating and we feel like Pakula is letting us in on some of the dirty little subversive things we've always feared may occur behind the doors of the seat of government. But ultimately, this is a story about a man who looks too long at the sun and is so intrigued yet blinded by what he sees, he ignores the nature of the sun, which is to both illuminate and to burn. Whether any of the conspiracy suggested is true, it remains one of the most compelling efforts of the seventies, and is a must-see. See it and judge for yourself.

The term, parallax, has everything to do with seeing, and as such it is particularly fitting for a film that is about seeing on many levels. Gordon Willis' distinctive cinematography is a perfect match for just such an enterprise. His commanding use of light, shapes, and (most of all) darkness creates a sense of uncertainty that flavors this so-called paranoid thriller. Along with under-sung director Alan J. Pakula, Willis is working here with pretty much the same production team that would next give us _All the President's Men_, but they do as well in this earlier film with apparently a lot less. Contrast the newsroom as shown here with the detailed recreation of The Washington Post in ATPM. It seems like Hume Cronyn and Warren Beatty are the whole newspaper in _The Parallax View_. That's fine. It's supposed to be two-bit paper.

We are shown eyewitnesses who don't know what they thought they saw during an assassination attempt. We don't know what we thought we saw either. We are shown conspirators who are constantly seeing around the next corner. We are kept guessing as well. We follow Warren Beatty nervously as he tries to keep ahead of this game. Kenneth Mars even gives Beatty a second false identity just in case the first one is checked. Finally, we take a slide-show psychological exam right along with Beatty, and perhaps we wonder what our own responses to it show us to be. It's a very special film that allows us to trust the filmmakers even though we know they may be giving us unreliable information. That blind trust seems to be the soul of this truly great movie.

Finally, I'd like to cast a vote for Mr. Beatty as one of our true American acting treasures. Where would the great films of the 70s be without his hip, wise-cracking presence? Did we expect Elliott Gould to do all the work?

Independent minded Senator Carroll is assassinated on top of the Space Needle. The assumed killer falls to his death and a commission declares him to be a lone gunman. Three years later, Lee Carter pleads with reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) to investigate the Carroll assassination. The people around Carroll on that day are getting killed off. Frady finds something disturbing. He is attacked by Sheriff Wicker. He kills Wicker and discovers the name Parallax Corporation among the sheriff's belongings. His boss is Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn) doesn't believe him at first. He suspects that they are recruiting psychopaths and he intends to infiltrate the organization.

The first half is really compelling. There is a good sense of paranoia. It fades a little after the plane bombing. They couldn't film the plane exploding. It's the first sign of the movie's limitations. I wish the movie could find the next gear but it's not really there. I also wasn't impressed with the long montage sequence that Frady sits through. It could be much more compelling but it feels derivative of 'A Clockwork Orange'. It's still a very good paranoid thriller.

There is so much to unpack here. Apart from this being a political (conspiracy) thriller it also may have the funniest lines outside of a Zucker/Abrams/Zucker production ... which I did not expect at all. There is doom and gloom and there is Warren Beauty ... in case you never saw him in young (I know it is spelled Beatty, but you'll forgive my very obvious pun).

Talking about very obvious, the movie and its premise and what it tells us the viewers is also not hiding behind anything. We get into the mindset of the main character and we do find out more about what happened and about what sort of still happens ... with a great director like Pakula at helm this does not get as much credit as it deserves at all. Neither back in the day (awards wise) nor now ... though with many wild conspiracies growing, it may be the wrong time to praise this at the moment ... still it is exceptional to say the least! I've never tried to kill myself succesfully ... just one of the many quotes one can take from this movie, without even spoiling anything! And up there with "there is no fighting in the war room"! :)

Interesting, but not entirely coherent. Quite original conspiracy theory and the twists therein. Very powerful ending.

Direction by Alan Pakula is solid: intrigue is built and maintained well.

However, the suspense is based more on style than substance. We are kept in suspense by lack of information, but some of this information is available, the director has just chosen to not reveal it. Plus the links between certain scenes are quite tenuous, at best. So, we have suspenseful scenes occurring in isolation (eg the plane scene), merely for the sake of intrigue and suspense.

By the end of the movie you are still none the wiser what is going on, and how it is going to end, but you know something is going on. The ending resolves this quite well, but until then it is really an illusory trick by the director, creating suspense with a disjointed plot and having the audience buy it.

However, look through all that, and you see the holes in the story.

Good performance by Warren Beatty in the lead role.

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. ****

Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View works best when it is showing us the unexplained phenomena that beg to be investigated and linked together by an enterprising and clever reporter to demonstrate the existence of a conspiracy. In those moments it's a tense, intelligent thrille, aided by great cinematography. Warren Beatty is credible and likable in the role. Paula Prentiss was outstanding in a brief but crucial role. The movie works less well when it focuses on the reporter's back story and on the chase scenes in cop cars, which 70s era movies loved so much. The overall effect is a positive one, to get us to think about how we are manipulated and could be mortally manipulated. You don't have to actually believe in any one particular consiracy theory to see the value of this film.

When I hear mention of Warren Beatty these days I almost begin to snore, but before Beatty became a boring old fart he made a handful of very interesting and adventurous movies like 'Mickey One', 'McCabe & Mrs Miller' and 'The Parallax View', hardly safe Hollywood movie star material. 'The Parallax View' is THE definitive 1970s paranoid thriller, beaten only by Coppola's 'The Conversation', released incidentally the same year. The movie has to be watched in the context of when it was made. It's shot through with post-Watergate cynicism and the Kennedy assassinations cast a long shadow over the plot. Beatty gives a very subtle, relaxed performance, and for me is totally believable. The supporting cast is first rate. Veteran Hume Cronyn ('Shadow Of A Doubt') plays Beatty's editor, Paula Prentiss ('The Stepford Wives') a hysterical fellow journalist, and William Daniels (Dustin Hoffman's father in 'The Graduate') has a brief but memorable bit as another witness who fears for his life. Also keep an eye out for the legendary Bill McKinney (who nobody who's ever seen 'Deliverance' will forget!) as an assassin, Anthony Zerbe ('The Omega Man') as a psychologist (playing Pong with a chimp!), and Earl Hindman ('The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three') in the bar fight scene. Much of 'The Parallax View' was later used in 'Arlington Road', an unconvincing movie which was much too contrived for me to be believable. It just didn't have the subtlety that this one has, and spelled everything out, seeming assuming its audience wasn't bright enough to get it. 'The Parallax View' is still one of the most intelligent, tense and effective conspiracy thrillers ever made, and the direction by the late Alan J. Pakula is just about flawless. Highly recommended.

This movie sets the tone quite effectively, and was able to hold my attention almost until the end...almost. The paranoia is tangible and made enjoyable thanks to the sure acting of Beatty. Everything is embellished by some outstanding cinematography, with some memorable moments, such as the test screening sequence and some breathtaking architecture in certain locations.

However, most of the plot is not plausible, it is not clear how the main characters gets his intel, how or when the "foe" he's fighting gets a step ahead. And from the indoor parade I got a bit lost because my attention dropped. It is still a movie I'd recommend and probably rewatch to get a better grasp of it.

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".

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 exactly what he is.

Pakula shoots on location to capture a careful texture of the outside world's danger much of the time. And he has a strong feeling for the bizarre, as in a scene where a character on a golf cart is shot in a vast banquet hall, and the cart strays, knocks over tables, until police cars arrive on the vestibule floor. There's also an endeavor to enforce the glare of modern American architecture throughout as a monumental backdrop, steel and glass edifices that look somehow…oppressive.

The conclusion has a relentless common sense to it. Sans spoilers, I can merely say that it both insinuates how an establishment might get away with murder, and how the "unassisted loner" hypothesis of assassination has a convincing tidiness about it.

Was The Parallax View a trial run for Pakula's brilliant All The President's Men which came out two years later? The visual style of both films is similar and one can't fault the mechanics of either film. But there are significant differences between the two that make ATPM a classic and Parallax dated.

All The President's Men was based on an actual historic incident and tried to portray it as authentically as possible while maintaining a thriller feel to the piece. Parallax was certainly inspired by the unfortunate assassination of Robert Kennedy which was recreated in the opening set piece. But, while the opening is genuinely interesting, the rest of the film goes off on tangents that are unexplained and don't really add any value.

The Parallax View has no real characterizations of the various players in the piece except Beatty. With ATPM, you had Redford, Hoffman, and the their editor, all characterizations rooted in real personalities and their interplay was fascinating. Here Beatty was made to look scruffy looking to cut down on the glamor boy image, but he's no Dustin Hoffman and can't really carry the film.

The whole conspiracy theory in Parallax was over the top and not at all convincing. There are sub-plots that lead nowhere. All in all, helmed by a solid craftsman with two good set-pieces and good use of the score but the basic script was weak. The funny thing is that after seeing this, I thought Pakula made it to capitalize on the success of ATPM. I saw surprised to see this was made two years earlier.