- This article is about the film, not the book by Slavoj Žižek.
The Parallax View is a 1974 American thriller film directed by Alan J. Pakula and starring Warren Beatty, who was also a producer. The film was adapted by David Giler, Lorenzo Semple Jr and an uncredited Robert Towne from the 1970 novel by Loren Singer. The story concerns a reporter's dangerous investigation into an obscure organization, the Parallax Corporation, whose primary, but not ostensible, enterprise is political assassination.
The Parallax View is one of a trilogy of thrillers directed by Pakula, along with Klute (1971) and All the President's Men (1976); The Parallax View was the only one not released by Warner Bros. Pictures.
Plot
Newspaper reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty), a talented, crusading reporter with a reputation for drunkenness and professional irresponsibility, and (former) girlfriend and colleague, Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), witness the public assassination of a Presidential candidate, Senator Charles Carroll (William Joyce), in the restaurant of the Space Needle in Seattle. A waiter armed with a revolver is seen as the assassin; he is chased from the restaurant onto the roof of the building, from which he falls. Meanwhile, a second waiter, also armed with a revolver, leaves the crime scene unnoticed; newspapers "officially" report the political killing as the work of a lone gunman. Three years later, while Frady is working for a small-town newspaper in Portland, Oregon, Lee Carter finds him, saying she feels there is more to the killing than mere assassination — that six of the witnesses to Senator Carroll's assassination have died and she fears she will be next. She questions Frady as to why as no one saw anything that differed from the official reporting of Senator Carroll's murder.
Lee Carter does die, ostensibly by a voluntary drug overdose and Frady investigates her leads. He is led to a small town sheriff (Kelly Thordsen) who is an operative of the Parallax Corporation and almost kills Frady, but is killed instead. Frady learns that the Parallax Corp. finds, recruits, and trains sociopaths as political assassins. On surviving a boat explosion in mid-interview of a witness, he then applies to Parallax with an application rigged with a homicidal maniac's psychological evaluation. Soon, Parallax communicates with him, via company-man Jack Younger (Walter McGinn), who assures Joe he is the kind of man they want to hire.
Frady is accepted to Parallax for training; he is audio-visually indoctrinated with a film that conflates positive images with negative actions. Later, he spies a Parallax man heading to a car and driving away; Joe follows him to a parking lot and watches him take out a bag from another car's trunk, then drive to an airport and check it in as baggage. Frady deduces it is a suitcase-bomb and hurriedly boards the plane himself. He notices a Senator seated in the first-class section, but the Parallax Corp. bomber is not aboard. Acting quickly, Frady writes a bomb threat in a lavatory mirror with a bar of soap for the stewardess to find, warning that there is a bomb on the plane, but removes it after finding another passenger is waiting outside the lavatory door. He then writes a warning on a napkin which he is able to slip back into the stack of napkins on the drink service cart the stewardesses are using. The warning is found by a stewardess who reads it and nervously goes to the cockpit. The pilot informs the passengers of technical difficulties and his intent to return to their destination, where they land and are evacuated — just before the suitcase bomb explodes.
Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn), Frady's generally skeptical editor, is listening to a secretly recorded tape of a conversation between Frady and Younger. Rintels' coffee, which has been poisoned, is delivered to the news office by a Parallax operative posing as a delivery man. After locking up the tape and petty cash in his desk drawer, Rintels is shown eating and drinking. In the next scene Rintels is shown slumped in his chair, and as police arrive, an officer says that it looks to be a simple death by heart attack. A moment later the desk drawer is shown to be unlocked, and while the cash in there, the tape is not.
Continuing his investigation, Frady, who does not know that his editor has been killed, follows the Parallax assassins to the dress rehearsal for a political rally for Senator Hammond (Jim Davis). Frady hides in the auditorium's rafters, to secretly observe what the Parallax men, also in the rafters, are up to. Too late, Joe realizes he was set up as the patsy or "fall guy" to follow them to the auditorium. Frady sees the politician killed, then notices a planted rifle, near him in the rafters. As the rehearsing people in the auditorium look for the gunman, up in the rafters' catwalk, they see Frady lurking. He hides and evades the initial search, but continues his escape from the murder site, and runs to a door open to the exterior, but is shot dead by one of the Parallax assassins on reaching the open door and framed posthumously for the murder of Senator Hammond.
An official assassination investigation committee, the same which determined the lone-gunman killing of Sen. Carroll, officially reports that newspaper reporter Joe Frady was the lone-gun assassin of Senator Hammond. Stating, for the official record, that Frady was obsessed with Carroll-assassination conspiracy theories which led him to kill Senator Hammond. Further, the committee states their hope that the verdict will end political assassination conspiracy theories; and that they will later publish more assassination information in the future. They do not take any questions from the press.
Production
Most of the images used in the montage were of anonymous figures, with occasional historical individuals such as Richard Nixon and Adolf Hitler. The montage also makes a great deal of use out of a drawing by Jack Kirby of the Marvel Comics character, Thor.
Such montages were popular in the film schools of the 1970s and can be seen in other contemporary films.[citation needed]
The distinctive anamorphic photography with long lens, unconventional framing and shallow focus was supervised by Gordon Willis.
See also
External links
