The Parallax View: One hell of a conspiracy thriller from the '70s

By Sreejith Kamalanayanan


The Parallax View (1974) is the second installment in the Paranoia trilogy of the late Hollywood director Alan J Pakula. Klute (1971) and All the President's Men (1976) are the other two movies in the trilogy.

I have seen the other two movies in the Paranoia trilogy; watched  Klute first and All the President's Men second and rounded off with The Parallax View. It didn't bother me that I watched the great trilogy breaking the order. After all, all of the movies can stand on its own.

Upon finishing the trilogy, it occurred to me that Pakula is a master in absorbing you into his movies, making you believe in the conspiracy theory and let you immersed in the sense of paranoia of the film. He presents the conspiracy theory with a sort of realism and we would fall for it.

In The Parallax View, the assassination of a presidential candidate is the center of the plot. The assassination opens the movie. He was shot by a waiter who falls into death immediately after the murder. However, the candidate was, in reality, shot by another waiter who had left the scene of murder quietly.

Everyone is convinced that the presidential candidate was killed by the dead waiter and they closes the investigation. However, in bizarre turn of events every individual who was present at the scene of investigation starts dying due to natural causes, one by one.

Our protagonist news reporter Joseph Frady, played by the legendary Warren Beatty, decides to dig deeper into the deaths. He is later convinced as the assassination and the deaths of witnesses are the handiwork of a corporation called The Parallax. The Parallax has its own team of professional assassins and Frady goes undercover and let the Parallax recruit him as an assassin.

I liked The Parallax View due to its photography, direction, pacing, suspense and the charisma of lead actor Warren Beatty. Many key scenes are shot in low-lit interiors, just like Klute, that adds to the sense of paranoia.

The '70s was a fertile period for conspiracy and paranoia thrillers mainly because of the political environment. It was the era of the Watergate Scandal, where journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered one of the biggest political scandals of all time. The scandal forced President Richard Nixon to step down.

The political environment would have instilled a sense of paranoia and doubt on the government in the people. This psychological state also reflected in the movies that came out during the '70s.

Critic Roger Ebert had commented that the hero of Parallax View was a reporter due to the influence of the Watergate scandal. In a previous era Beatty would have played a detective, Ebert said.

It is in this context that the Parallax View must be viewed. You need to get a sense of the times. I would recommend other movies like All the President's Men, and Three Days of the Condor(1975) to better understand the times.