Customer Reviews

The Parallax View

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Beatty plays journalist investigating mysterious deaths of witnesses to a political assassination.

Pakula's dark and paranoid masterpiece was origninally shot by Gordon Willis (Godfathers I II and III, Klute, Zeilig, etc.) in 2.35 aspect. Willis, a master of light and composition, developed frames for this film that are practically abstract. His sense of composition (I'm sure Pakula was part of this) is brilliant: the static formalistic compositions; the use of long lenses to flatten each image into an (almost) isometric projection.

Now, maybe I'm getting carried away here, but "parallax" and "isometric"...? Hmmm... Both are terms related to geometry the "perception" of reality -- which is more-or-less the subtext of this film.

Anyway, after its dissapearance from theater screens this film made numerous appearances on TV (mainly late at night) in a pan-and-scan version. Same with the VHS version. So until the DVD was released, this was the only way I (and most other people) had seen it.

Well twice the frame is twice as good -- now entire sequences can be re-examined and reinterpreted (the ending has elements which appeared seperated in the VHS version).

I found the picture and sound to be good, but I'd hoped for more additional material (a documentary, a making of, an interview or two -- anything). This is certainly one film that deserves the extra attention. However I'm grateful for the 2.35 version.

Bottom line: a real treat for cinephiles, and a great movie for everyone else.

Reminds me very much of THE WICKER MAN (released that same year of '74) in that both films chart the nightmarish progress of men who are seeking to uncover a mystery and right a great wrong, who must plunge into disorienting environments where none of the rules they adhered to back in the 'normal world' apply; they can't get their footing, and quickly become controlled by events. By the time they realize their every step has been not just watched but directed from the beginning...it's too late.

Warren Beatty's Joe Frady, a minor reporter in the Northwest, begins investigating the deaths of witnesses to a political assassination he'd covered three years before. He stumbles upon literature from The Parallax Corporation, an outfit he comes to believe are clandestinely recruiting & training assassins; he decides to penetrate the group as a 'job applicant', armed with a mass-murderer's psych-test responses and a false identity. He has made a slight but fatal error in judgment, however, for Parallax are in the business of identifying and grooming fall guys - custom-built, designer patsies to draw attention from their trained cadre of actual assassins during the deed, then to be killed in the ensuing melee. Ingeniously, Parallax carefully select appropriate moody-loner backgrounds that will satisfy official inquiries into the murder that the killer was a certified strange-o, thus acting alone.

The first half of PARALLAX plays like a standard macho action picture: barroom brawls, car chases, grouchy editors, redneck cops, sexually forthright women swarming over the studly maverick hero. Stay with it, however. The second half is obviously the movie Beatty, Pakula and Gordon Willis were after - stark, overwhelmingly visual, mountingly claustrophic yet set in vastness (every interior set is like an aircraft hangar; even the catwalk goes on forever). The car chase bravado of the first hour is long forgotten by this point, with Beatty assuming the holy-fool status of Edward Woodward's stiff-necked policeman in THE WICKER MAN. While it's true the two halves of this film never do fit together comfortably, the nightcap of this double feature ranks among the best moviemaking of the 1970s.

The Parallax View is the ultimate paranoia film, bar none. It is the standard by which all other films of this genre are judged. In other words, it is a classic. It combines stellar direction with a very believable performance by Warren Beatty to create a film that has no equal. From the opening on the Space Needle, it is obvious this movie isn't going to be run of the mill. From there, every plot line just gets bigger and bigger, until everything envelops Warren Beatty to form the film's stunning conclusion. Alan Pakula would eventually follow this film up with All The Presidents Men, that film is good, but this film is great. It stands as his masterwork, and it is the best of the 70's paranoia pictures.

"The Parallax View" remains one of the classic paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the 1970's.

Released during the height of the Watergate revelations and just a few years after the assassinations of the sixties, "Parallax" played on the general public mistrust of the government, politicians and big monolithic corporations.

Director Alan Pakula ("All The President's Men") gives the film a stunning visual style (the reporter hero (Warren Beatty) is continually shown being dwarfed by the large Parallax steel and glass headquarters)and the short film Beatty is told to watch as he attempts to infiltrate the Parallax conspiracy remains one of the best moments ever in a feature film.

The quality of the DVD is superb (especially considering the film is almost 30 years old), images are sharp and clear.

However,considering the film's dense subject matter, one would have hoped Paramount would have included some additional special features (interviews with political activist Beatty, screenwriters Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Giler; making of featurette etc).

Example: the final shooting script of "Parallax" is completely different from the original screenplay that was written by Semple; Beatty changed the character of the hero from a small town cop to an investigative reporter.

The only special feature included on the DVD is an well produced 1974 theatrical trailer.

However, the widescreen version of the film is a far improvement over the pan and scan version available on VHS.

Conspiracy buffs still find "The Parallax View" one of the best films of the genre.

To start, this movie isn't aimed at the no-brainer-Friday-the-13th crowd. If you want mindless entertainment, you'd better look elsewhere. This is a movie that will make you THINK.

To put it briefly, the movie is similar to a Robert Ludlom movie--nothing is what it seems, and there are conspiracies and double crosses at every bend. The most commonly mentioned sequence, i.e. the montage, will either strike you as boring or a tour-de-force, depending upon your psychological makeup. I've always felt its importance overrated.

Rather, it's the convoluted plot that makes this movie worth repeated viewing. In fact, it's a movie that reveals more and more with each viewing--it wasn't until about the 3rd viewing that I realized that the whole thing was a major slap at the Warren Commission (for those that don't remember, the Warren Commission decided Oswald was JFK's lone killer).

So sit right back, put on your thinking cap, and enjoy a masterpiece.

I also think this is a very good movie... I'd like to give an extra special mention to the audio visual experience that is the psychometric test which Beatty undergoes. It is an example of wonderful film-making - still images and text being manipulated by a great director - perfectly pitched with the soundtrack. A must-see for students of Film and Graphic Design because it reminds people that low-tech film making in the hands of someone with an idea can be more effective that a mega budget piece of rubbish - it could be seen as a brilliant technique to exploit storytelling on the net while we still have to put up with low band width streaming. ...

"The Parallax View," Alan J Pakula's classic 70's paranoid conpiracy thriller, gets the shortest of DVD shrifts from Paramount Home Video.

Save for a well done trailer, there are NO extras, not even English subtitles for us dialouge freaks.

Warren Beatty, in one of his coolest movie star turns, plays Joe Frady, a "third rate journalist from Oregon" who stumbles onto a massive conspiracy run by the shadowy Parallax Organization who represented in the film by the late, great character actor Walter Mc Ginn, is "in the business of recruiting assasssins."

What makes "Parallax" even more menacing is that the screenplay gives this assassination bureau no particular political bent...both liberal and conservative presidential hopefuls are targeted.

It may be interesting to note that two screenplays for "Parallax" were commissioned (the first by Lorenzo Semple Jr, the second by David Giler) and rejected.

The material that was actually shot was heavily re written by Pakula, Beatty and allegedly by an uncredited Robert Towne during a Hollywood writer's strike in the spring of 1974.

Hence the Beatty character, originally written as a small town cop, becomes a rogue investigative reporter with a talent for "creative irresponsibility,"-- according to a new biogrpahy of Pakula, much of the screenplay was still being written as the film was shot.

Aside from Pakula's remarkable contributions, much of the impact of "Parallax" comes from Gordon Willis' cinematography (Beatty's character is dwarfed by the large glass and steel high rise that houses Parallax's "Division of Human Engineering), and by the late Michael Small's minimilast score--the Parallax murders are heralded by a creepy, recurring anthem.

"Parallax View" released in June of 1974, two months before the Nixon resignation, was a box office failure, owing to the fact perhaps that Paramount put all its promotional efforts into "Chinatown," a personal production of then studio head Robert Evans.

It's lack of commercial success was probably due in larger part that the film was a slice of unrelenting paranoid perversity--Beatty's reporter hero is defeated by the conspiracy and his character is both killed and framed 'Oswald-like' for the film's last assassination--Beatty would return to the screen, more truee to type, a few months later as a Beverly Hills hairdresser who beds every woman on the West Coast.



"Parallax View" cries out for a 2 disc special edition, such as Warner Brothers is giving another Pakula conspiracy film, "All The President's Men" in late February.

Pakula's gone but perhaps Beatty could be coaxed out of his mountain hideaway to do a commentary and some of those researchers who put together the material for the Parallax employment test (one of the great moments in movie history)might make themselves available. Pakula reportedly spent four months putting together this powerful and divertingly amazing sequence.

Extra note of trivia: Earl Hindman, the actor who plays the redneck deputy who picks a fight with Beatty in a small town bar, was the voice of Tim Allen's next door neighbor in "Home Improvement."

From the moment reporter Frady (Beatty) decides to investigate, he's caught in an anonymous web whose only face is that of the sinister Jack Younger (McGinn). How far does the web extend-- we can only guess. For Frady, it stretches from a tiny hamlet in the Pacific Northwest to a soaring glass monolith somewhere in urban America.

Probably no film captures the paranoid unease of the years between the JFK assassination and the Nixon resignation better than this one. Apprehension flowed like a dark undercurrent throughout the land. Something had happened in Dallas, Memphis, and LA's Ambassador Hotel, but no one could be sure what. And every night on TV screens, were the gathering horrors of Vietnam. It was like the country had suddenly woken up to a different America, one whose destiny was no longer in familiar hands. You didn't have to be a liberal or an activist to feel a gnawing sense of dislocation.

Frady's complascent little world of "third-rate" journalism, is also interrupted the moment his jilted lover Lee Carter (Prentiss) is wheeled into the autopsy room, dead by her own forecast. From then on it's a Kafkaesque pursuit of diabolical forces only dimly perceived. Conversations become muted. We hear only tantalizing bits and pieces, such as the senator aboard the flight to Denver.

Note how often telling scenes are filmed elliptically, either through glass panes, gauzy curtains, or at a distance, all of which impart not only a conspiratorial air, but a sense of viewer powerlessness much the way larger national events had suddenly escaped public grasp. This is not a movie to look away from for even a moment. The story is conveyed as much by camera as by dialogue, as when editor Rintels' (Hume Cronyn) lock-box disappears in a flash. Note also the expert use of silent intervals when characters such as Austin Tucker (William Daniels) simply stare off into space. Suddenly, events are thrown back on us to confront the tensions that have been mounting.

The sense of dislocation-- of things being not quite what they seem-- is pervasive, and is no better conveyed than in the justly celebrated test sequence. There stark images follow one another in rapid-fire succession like an on-rushing train. At first the images unfold logically after the title cards, pictures of mother, wife, etc. following upon the word "Love". But then the images begin to jumble-- love with hate, war with peace-- and the sense of normality begins to crumble, collapsing finally into a chaos of contradictions until a blond hero figure returns the associations to proper balance. Nonetheless, the world has been turned upside down, if only for a few moments, yet the impression of dislocation remains. It's a powerfully disturbing sequence.

The metaphor for what Frady faces lies in the massive slab of glass from whose bowels tiny figures emerge. It's a blank wall devoid of any identity of its own. Try to see inside and only an outside image is cast back. It's a giant mirror. Thus the public ends up seeing nothing beyond a reflection of itself. Yet the power of the shrouded interior is as undeniable as that gushing force of nature loosed upon the channel beneath the Salmon Creek dam.

Beatty underplays throughout, at times barely registering at all. But that's how it should be, since the story carries the film. It's really McGinn as the sinister Jack Younger who makes the impression. His voice and manner convey just the right edge, a subtle hint of concealed networks lurking in the background. The movie really turns on his performance, and he brings it off beautifully. My one complaint is the barroom brawl. It seems unduly melodramatic for a movie whose style appears deliberately understated.

Thirty years later and most Americans have only textbook knowledge of that explosive period and a world turned upside down. Parallax View may be a work of fiction, but it remains a telling insight into what much of the public was feeling. At movie's end, Frady rushes from the darkness toward the light of an open doorway only to be gunned down before he can reach the source. In 1978, the House Committee on Assassinations issued its findings. Contrary to the hurried Warren Report, the Committee found that JFK "was probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy". But there was never any follow-up to that finding. It was as if committee members suddenly saw a light from an opening door but were unwilling to pass through. One doesn't have to agree to appreciate the historical or entertainment value of the movie. Parallax View remains a testament to its makers and to a period that in many ways is still with us.

My copy is a new tape which is fine. However, the movie has enough merit to look into an expanded DVD version if such is available.

Warren Beatty is great in this movie. So is Hume Cronyn and a host of others you'll recognize from the 1970's TV and Film. But the real star of this movie is the story ... a mystery inside an enigma wrapped up in a riddle. Born from the investigations into the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King Jr. and RFK and the investigations into each this story is all too plausible ... and frightenly believable. 1960's were turbulent times, with great movements and events all over the nation and the world. It's not unthinkable that some wanted to control the outcome of these events.

Towards this theory, "The Parallax View" demonstrates how bogus corporations recruit certain profiled individuals to carry out their objectives using trickery and deceit to "compartmentalize" the actor and eliminate the "target". This movie requires close attention to see all the subtle elements. If you ever thought the assassinations of America's leaders in the 1960's were "glossed over" then this movie is for you. It's a paranoia storyline to be sure, but perhaps a little skepticism is healthy from time to time.

The only thing I'm not crazy about in the film is its 1974 production. So the clothes and cars are so out of date as to be distracting from the storyline. I think this film is an excellent candidate for remake and I'l like to see a director like Ridley Scott or James Cameron look at this script.

For movies of the same genre, be sure and check out "Executive Action" with Burt Lancaster. Another 5-star effort.

"The Parallax View" an Alan Pakula directed political thriller released amid the paranoic events surrounding the Watergate conspiracy contained appropriate subject matter for those times. Reporter Joe Frady played by Warren Beatty is one of a group of seven reporters present during the assassination of U.S. Senator Carroll atop Seattle's Space Needle.

Three years later five reporters have mysteriously perished leaving only Beatty and reporter Austin Tucker played by William Daniels alive. Daniels is soon to be blown up in an explosion aboard a sailboat. Beatty with the acknowledgement of his editor Billy Rintels played by the venerable Hume Cronyn becomes obsessed with investigating these strange circumstances.

He travels to the location of the demise of one of the reporters who witnessed the assassination. While there, he runs afoul of the local sheriff who tries to drown him. Beatty turns the tables and the sheriff is killed. While searching the premises of the crooked sheriff, he comes across some suspicious literature from the Parallax Corporation. Apparently this shadowy organization is attempting to recruit would be killers for reasons unknown. Beatty decides to apply with the organization, falsifying a probing application, to help make headway with his inquest.

Beatty an unlikely hero in this film uses guile to try to infiltrate the Parallax Corp. but danger seems to follow him around every turn as he becomes aware of a deeply rooted political conspiracy.