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The Parallax View (1974) More at IMDbPro »

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95 comments in total

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33 out of 45 people found the following comment useful :-
THE definitive 1970s paranoid thriller. Intelligent, tense and effective., 23 February 2004
Author: Infofreak from Perth, Australia

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.

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26 out of 34 people found the following comment useful :-
A Triumph in Cinematography as Seeing, 15 January 2003

Author: rrebenstorf from Nashville, TN

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?

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24 out of 35 people found the following comment useful :-
Fascinating And Creepy View To Kill, 11 July 2005

Author: Hal-900 from WA, USA

Tricky Dicky Nixon is known for a lot of (mostly bad) things, but I'd like to think that he is responsible for a slew of genuinely great conspiracy-theory films that were made as a direct result of the Watergate scandal. I'm not sure if this thriller by director Pakula is the best of its kind, but I'm totally convinced that it is the scariest one. In the film nothing is as it appears to be. People die suddenly, and shockingly, as if they were struck down by an out of this world force. As I watched this movie, I felt as nervous as some of the characters in the film because it is truly unnerving to think that one could be in a situation in which you have no control over your fate; it is the 'Patriot Act' gone bad. Warren Beatty is surprisingly great as the doomed hero of this piece of the macabre. But the true hero of the production is cinematographer Gordon Willis; his superb chiaroscuro cinematography is (no exaggeration) among the best of the decade. Sound, editing and production design contribute to create the film's spine-tingling atmosphere (Pakula and most of his team were also responsible for the masterful "All the President's Men"). In addition, the film has strong film noir tendencies, so fans of the genre should check this one out. Terrific film from start to finish.

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15 out of 18 people found the following comment useful :-
Existentialism with a political twist, 27 March 2003

Author: Jugu Abraham (jugu_abraham@yahoo.co.uk) from Trivandrum, Kerala, India

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.

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10 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
Mainstream US Cinema at its 70s Best, 1 September 2006
Author: robertconnor from England

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.

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19 out of 28 people found the following comment useful :-
Political conspiracy thriller par excellence., 4 December 1998
Author: Andrew McNess (asm@ne.com.au) from Geelong, Australia

The late Alan J. Pakula's 1974 film about political murders is a superbly crafted thriller that holds the audience in its quiet, unsettling grip.

Warren Beatty gives his character of Joe Frady, a "third-rate" journalist, just the right balance of recklessness and determination to enable one to have faith in this man to uncover such shady, potentially threatening goings-on.

Beatty is ably backed up by the supporting cast, most notably Hume Cronyn as Frady's editor, and Paula Prentiss and William Daniels as, respectively, a television reporter and columnist both in fear for their lives.

Composer Michael Small's main theme (used at strategic points throughout the film and often playing on the traditional patriotic sound of the trumpet) has a quality both mournful and despairing that relates effectively to what we are watching. It is a rather sparse music score, but this seems to add to its power. Gordon Willis's Panavision photography conveys threat in even the most everyday of locations (his rendering of modern architecture is especially strong in suggesting a faceless, omnipotent threat), while the editing rhythms and sound design contribute a great deal in throwing the audience off-balance.

Pakula has been involved in more widely-known projects such as All The President's Men and Presumed Innocent, but The Parallax View is definitely one of his best and most powerful films.

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19 out of 31 people found the following comment useful :-
Once upon a time, before Oliver Stone..., 4 June 2005

Author: Lee Eisenberg (eisenberg.lee@gmail.com) from Portland, Oregon, USA

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".

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8 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
"Theres no conspiracy, every death can be explained ! - - - - - - Or can they?", 3 March 2007

Author: Graham Watson from Gibraltar

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

There are many people who comment on the IMDb web site that are in the movie industry in some capacity struggling to earn a living in writing, directing or producing and even the ones on the outside that are looking in and can't find work. They see their vastly superior scripts, or movies that they are trying to promote or be financed rejected and then they come across a film such as the PARALLAX VIEW, it must drive them potty having to make sense of this! That's too bad for them, but in my case I'm just an end user, I don't care about poor writing or plot holes or if a movie is a bit of a train wreck. I judge a film positively simply on the basis if it keeps my attention and entertains me, or there are scenes in it that I like, nothing else!

In 1974 this type of movie was contemporary with America embroiled in a political and constitutional crisis with Watergate and struggling to come to terms with the aftermath of the Vietnam war as well as the hangover from the assassination of a President in 1963 . An investigation followed where the official report from the "Warren Commission" concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone as the assassin . If this wasn't bad enough Oswald himself was rubbed out while in police custody by Jack Ruby who also died very shortly after, seemingly in mysterious circumstances. In addition over the years there was apparently an unusually high number of deaths from people who were at some capacity involved or close to the facility of the JFK shooting i.e doctors, nurses, coroners, security etc. Endless documentaries and books outlined the fact that many suffered more than there fare share of coronaries or pulmonary embolisms, car crashes ,drownings and suicides in the immediate post-assassination years!

In addition if that wasn't enough ten years on from JFK and after the assassination of prominent civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr and popular democratic presidential hopeful Bobby Kennedy as well as an failed attempt on segregationist and presidential contender George Wallace, a skeptical US public did not buy the official line of a lone deranged gunmen with a grudge. The government had lied to them for so long about so much, they were just ripe for alternative view or theory.

What I like about this movie is the atmosphere created by Pakula the music score both at the beginning and the end as well as in certain areas during the movie. Also there is an eerie sense of foreboding, it's quite unsettling. There are some good scenes i.e. up on top of the Seattle space needle, the grinning assassin at the bottom after, Joe Frady on the plane, the meeting with one of his female companions, the desperate and frightened Austin Tucker and lastly the brain washing scene at the parallax complex. I admit to seeing plot holes and I understand that it's frustrating at times with more questions than answers here, but it still kept my attention.

The ending is unsatisfactory and not easy to explain? Did Parallax realize that Frady was an investigative reporter, or was he simply hired to be a patsy that would take the fall for a killing? I believe that it's likely that the movie allows the viewer to fill in these plot holes anyway they like bearing in mind that it would be impossible to produce this type of conspiracy in under two hours. Also, they would have to fill in the gaps and form their own conclusions! Then again, maybe Pakula was being subtle! The fact that the events that unfolded are not plausible only reinforced my feeling that maybe it was just his way of pointing out to a cynical public that the idea of this type of organized conspiracy was simply ludicrous, so he presented a film that suggests just that!

Personally I liked the movie, there is a good cast with Warren Beatty, William Daniels, Paula Prentiss, Hume Conyn and Earl Hindaman (who played Mr Brown in the taking of Pelham 1,2,3). In particular I liked Bill McKinley as the assassin, he never said much but came over as menacing, he really seemed to enjoy his work! Overall, more worked for me in this film than didn't. If you like 70's films and government conspiracy movies you'll probably get a kick out of this. There are also some nice out door shots too. I would recommend this movie.

Note: in 1975 a year after this movie was released President Gerald Ford who prior to becoming president was on the "warren Commission" was also a victim of a couple assassination attempts on him, apparently from lone deranged gun-women. Also, ironically both Walter McGinn and Alan.J.Pakula were killed in automobile accidents a few years later.)

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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Probably Warren Beatty's best effort ever., 21 November 2006

Author: revtg1-2 from United States

All the positive clichés apply here. Fast moving. Intriguing. Hard hitting. Unrelenting. Absorbing. Casting, editing, story line, directing, acting and photography all come together. A seemingly innocuous, but tenacious, reporter starts out to find the persons and reasons behind a political assassination. The more obstacles that appear in his path, the more determined he becomes. Opposition seems to come from every direction. He is ambushed by persons he would never suspect could be involved. The search evolves into a struggle, then a physical fight for his life as the people responsible target him and he has no way of knowing where the next ambush will come from. The goal of uncovering the truth becomes secondary to staying alive when he becomes the hunted instead of the hunter. No one who could help him believes him, of course. Warren Beatty fan or not, if you don't like this movie then stick to Disney cartoons. As fine a supporting cast as one could ask for.

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7 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
Terrifying Masterpiece, 7 May 2003

Author: secragt from United States

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 corporate 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.

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