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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.
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.
It was a good movie, worth watching again after all these years.
The title refers to seeing something from another viewpoint. The story begins with a view of a totem pole, then the Seattle Space Tower. Read more
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