Apart from this being a political (conspiracy) thriller it also may have the funniest lines outside of a Zucker/Abrams/Zucker production. '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. 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 MOVIE
Much of 'The Parallax View' was later used in 'Arlington Road', an unconvincing movie which was much too contrived for me to be believable. 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. 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. Beatty gives a very subtle, relaxed performance, and for me is totally believable. It's shot through with post-Watergate cynicism and the Kennedy assassinations cast a long shadow over the plot.
The movie has to be watched in the context of when it was made. 'The Parallax View' is THE definitive 1970s paranoid thriller, beaten only by Coppola's 'The Conversation', released incidentally the same year. 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. 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. 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. "Parallax View" among all these films touched the subject of politics using the least obscure metaphors and similies. 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. 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. Articles on Pakula often focus on his award-winning work and neglect this fine movie. "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. 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. I saw this film first some twenty years ago and loved it.
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