Parallax View, The

The Parallax View (1974), an American thriller loosely based on the 1970 novel of the same name by Loren Singer. One of several political thrillers of the 1970s in the vein of Three Days of the Condor and All The President's Men. Directed by Alan J. Pakula, the movie starts with a TV reporter named Lee Carter (played by Paula Prentiss) who is witness to the assassination of a presidential candidate at the top of the Seattle Space Needle by a waiter wielding a hand gun.Fast forward three years later, Carter seeks out her ex, Joe Frady, a sort of anti-government conspiracy theorist newspaper reporter (played by Warren Beatty). Carter is scared, says six of the witnesses to the assassination have died and is fearful she is next. The deaths, while odd coincidences, appear not to be murder. Frady dismisses her concerns. Blam, next scene, we see Carter's body in the morgue. Supposedly of a drug overdose.Frady falls down a rabbit hole investigating, starting with the death of another of the witnesses. Along the way Frady discovers the existence of the Parallax Corporation, which possibly finds and employs people as political assassins. The rest of the film is Frady (with some help back at the office from his skeptical editor) trying to find the truth, dodging attempts on his life while trying to infiltrate the corporation.It really held my interest. There is some good intrigue, some cool spycraft type scenes, some good action, and several surprises. Some of the visuals are rather impressive, especially a fight atop the Space Needle and the climatic final scene. It's a dark movie and though there are some touches of humor fairly early on, for the most part it is full of tension, paranoia, conspiracies, and murder. Not everything is completely answered but that works, as it fits the whole conspiracy at the heart of the film.It was fun seeing life in the 70s, including where Frady boards an airliner and only after it takes off and is flying does he buy a ticket on the plane!

Well I have seen this movie some years ago...I really watched because of Warren Beatty..and the fact that I am a huge fan of his work from the 1960's-1990's. Second he is the brother of Shirley McClain that fabulous Actress,Dancer and saucy gal... The movie feels like what could have happened if Richard Nixon hadn't been removed from office had he gotten his way during an election ? All jokes aside there are many that consider (Tmp) to be a similar flop of an american president as Richard Nixon was ..! Warren Beatty is such a pretty fella..that you have to step outside of the beauty to enjoy his performance in front of the camera, Kinda like Paul Newman,Robert Redford and Cary Grant ..the effect they had on movie goer's preferably FEMALE. LOL ..The script was pretty good,the location and the cast blended in rather well.. Paula Prentiss she is remembered from her 1960's movies,..Hume Cronyn who plays the news paper boss..what a great talent.. He was married to Jessica Tandy of "Driving Miss Daisy" fame ..Jim Davis who was assassinated in the ball room ..we know him the CBS tv series "Dallas" ..he played "Jock Ewing Sr"..before he died from Cancer in 1981..movies like these really make you wander .. Could something like this actually happen in the world.. The answer ...... YES ! You can never trust the government can ..you?

"The Parallax View," the second of director Alan J. Pakula's "paranoia trilogy" ("Klute" [1971] and "All the President's Men" [1976]), is the least of the three. That's sad, because it has a lot going for it. Warren Beatty gives a decent if uninspired performance, outshone by his supporting cast of Hume Cronyn, William Daniels, Kenneth Mars, Anthony Zerbe, and Paula Prentiss in much smaller roles. Cinematographer Gordon Willis was one of the best in the business, and his talent is fully unfurled here. Michael Towne's music suits the proceedings. Pakula stages some terrific scenes as set-pieces with creativity and verve.The problem, as so often is the case, lies in the script, credited to David Giler and Lorenzo Semple, Jr. (and an uncredited Robert Towne, who gave us one the finest movie scripts of the past fifty years, "Chinatown" [1974]). I think it will spoil no one's first viewing to say that the story involves a secret cabal, operating within the U.S., whose business is political assassinations. There's no clear indication who owns it or that its members hold an allegiance to anything other than the Almighty Dollar. Characters around Beatty's start dropping like flies for plausible reasons, which he rightly suspects were murders. Exactly why they were rubbed out is unclear: evidently they witnessed, or were suspected of witnessing, more or other than they should have at the site of one such assassination. So Beatty's hunt begins, twists in improbable ways, with a lot more folks around him cashing in their chips. Framing scenes inform us, in a highly stylized manner, that government investigations uncovered no conspiracies but only single, sociopathic assassins. By the movie's end we know that's bushwa, but that's pretty much all we know, or maybe are supposed to know.Hitchcock said that, in order to keep audiences in suspense, everything must be made absolutely clear to them. They can't be properly frightened if the menace is vague or confused. And, for me, that's the main problem with "Parallax." With similar political thrillers—"The Manchurian Candidate," "The Day of the Jackal," "Three Days of the Condor" (the latter also scripted by Semple)—we're puzzled early on but finally the fog lifts and we understand exactly what's happening and why. "Parallax" needed another rewrite to really grip me. As it stands, all I know is that innocents know they will be wiped out, are wiped out, and the facts get swept under the rug. In real life that happens. In reel life I expect more for my investment of time and money.

This is a review of the 2004 Region 2 DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment. This product does, sadly, look its age: the sound is OK, the picture too, but the overall quality is pretty average. Unfortunately, there are few alternatives, if one wishes to see this interesting example of 1970s political paranoia.American novelist Loren Singer had served with the Office of Strategic Services, the fore-runner of the CIA, in WW2. His insight into covert operations informed his subsequent writing. In 1970, he wrote a political thriller, ‘The Parallax View’, looking at a journalist investigating the deaths of witnesses to the assassination of a Presidential candidate, attributed to a lone gunman. The 1960s had seen the shooting of both President John Kennedy and his brother Bobby. Nearly 60 years later, the former still attracts much speculation regarding a possible conspiracy.Several writers worked on the screenplay, but apparently, Robert Towne, who wrote the script for ‘Chinatown’(1974) did some uncredited re-working, at the behest of the star, Warren Beatty. Beatty, a long-time Democrat, was close to liberal Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern. He was also a friend of independent-minded Republican Senator John McCain, who was so detested by Trump; Beatty was a Pallbearer at McCain’s funeral. So it is no surprise to find him involved in this very political, very paranoid, conspiracy thriller. It mines a deep vein of such movies from the 1970s, some fiction ~ ‘The Day of the Jackal’(1973); ’Three Days of the Condor’(1975), others not ~ ‘All the President’s Men’(1976).Beatty plays Joseph Frady, the slightly flaky investigative journalist who sets out to follow up clues about an assassination, much like the book. He is very good, giving a persuasive performance as a man with an uneven career to date, who may or may not be a reliable judge of the true facts. Particularly good is the veteran Canadian character actor Hume Cronyn, as Frady’s long-suffering, supportive newspaper editor, Bill Rintels. But Beatty really carries the film.The script is intelligently written and punctuated with humour. The use of location is excellent, with stand-outs being Seattle’s Space Needle and the Gorge Dam on Washington’s Skagit River. There are several very exciting action sequences, especially those involving the tower and dam. The use of long lens shots gives a nice feeling of disquiet and of being watched. However, we felt that the pacing of the film was rather uneven, with some odd periods of ‘longueur’.The film received a wide array of reviews on release, though today, it is generally highly regarded. Personally, and no doubt controversially, I felt that it was, to a degree, annoying smoke and mirrors. It looks clever and avante garde, but actually, the plot is lazy, full of scary ideas and nasty allusions, but without ever explaining itself. Any who-dunnit is easy to write, if you only have a body and no motive, no culprit. 3 disappointing Stars.

A great early 70's film about political conspiracy and paranoia is given a weak DVD transfer by Paramount. This classic film deserves a remastering and a blu-ray release. If Paramount cannot be bothered, then they should licence the film to a boutique label such as Criterion, Masters of Cinema or Arrow.

It's ok. I didn't think I'd seen it but as it neared the end I realised I had watched it many years ago. It is ok as a bit of period entertainment but it hasn't dated well and some parts of the plot stretched my credulity to breaking point. The editing seemed a bit jumpy at some points but perhaps that was intentional. I did jump when the boat blew up though!

It starts as a normal just a murder film. But it turns into something else.It is one of the best film, but these days it nearly not heard of at all.All I can say it needs to be seen by people

Well, it may look dated to a younger audience but has not lost its punch from the dark and threatening world that is being portrayed. Warren Beatty has found just the right level with this role and makes it very real with the right edge to his performance.