12/29/2023 0 Comments The parallax viewThe slippery facelessness of the conspiracy is the true nightmare. How many thrillers have turned on the revelation that a single diabolical executive or politician has been bumping people off to cover up their evil plans? But because it isn’t a person or persons who Joe turns out to be infiltrating, but an elaborate network whose bland corporatism is more chilling than if it had turned out to be some ideological cabal of fanatics. Not because the people behind the killings turn out to be highly placed. It’s a clunky bit of work, among the few misfiring segments in this otherwise clean and well-tooled film, with a chair-smashing bar fight and tire-squealing car chase that feel dropped in from some forgettable bit of ’70s bosh.īut once Joe gets his first hard piece of evidence-a personality questionnaire from the Parallax Corporation’s “Department of Human Engineering”-the narrative bends sinister. That familiarity becomes more apparent when Joe goes to a remote town looking into the suspicious death of a judge. He jumps on the story after his TV reporter friend Lee (Paula Prentiss) comes to his room panicking about all the Space Needle witnesses turning up dead only to then die herself of supposedly natural causes.Īt this point, The Parallax View‘s screenplay could stand-in for dozens of similarly-plotted films that followed. Trying to get past a career-derailing drinking problem and barely tolerated by Bill (Hume Cronyn), his Seattle newspaper editor, Joe flashes that Beatty shrug and smile and seems able to get by with just about anything. Warren Beatty’s shaggy-coiffed Joe is set up from the start to be a familiar kind of hero whose Bogart idealism is barely concealed by a thin layer of sarcasm. Other people who witnessed the shooting start to die, which is when a reporter gets on the trail. A senator whose “independence” is described in breathless terms by a besotted reporter is gunned down, supposedly by a waiter who then falls to his death.Īn investigation, represented by a shadow-shrouded Star Chamber of aloof justices, finds nothing further to investigate and encourages the public to move on. It starts at a gala bash at the Space Needle, one of many imposing structures that loom over the film’s seemingly powerless characters. But in execution, the film more closely resembles one of the year’s other cinematic landmarks, Coppola‘s The Godfather Part II (1974), whose indictment of American corporate-political criminality was similarly ruthless but still somewhat toothless by comparison.īookended by political assassinations blamed on deranged lone gunmen, The Parallax View plugs right into the anomie coursing through the country after the previous decade’s heroes had been cut down one after the other. The screenplay reads like the kind of thing that might play at the drive-in to a half-attentive Friday night crowd. Ostensibly a thriller about an intrepid newspaper reporter digging into mysterious deaths, the film’s plot is fairly pedestrian. Released in June 1974, one year after the start of the Watergate hearings and just two months before President Nixon’s resignation, it channeled that season of mistrust and disgust without ever directly alluding to it. Pakula‘s The Parallax View in a conspiracy-addled 2021 can produce somewhat of an out-of-body experience. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.” -Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. “The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F.
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