- Familiar to any student of astronomy, the term "parallax" describes how an object can appear to shift position depending on the angle at which it is viewed. In everyday life, this effect can be achieved by looking at a nearby object while blinking back and forth between one eye and the other. Simply put, things look different from different angles, and that's exactly the point of Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View. One angle is that of the Congressional committee that asserts "there is no evidence of any wider conspiracy" in the assassinations of two Senators in the span of three years. Another angle is taken by newspaper editor Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn) who blames random chance for the death of several witnesses to the first assassination. Still another is adopted by Rintels' dogged reporter, Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty), who thinks somebody is knocking off witnesses and training assassins. He's half right.
- But let's start, as the film does, with that startling first assassination set on the top of Seattle's Space Needle. Senator Carroll (William Joyce) is in the midst of thanking everyone for their support when shots ring out and blood spatters the observation deck windows. A man dressed as a waiter (Chuck Waters) is pursued outdoors and goes tumbling over the side. Incidentally, real-life stuntman Chuck Waters is actually shown falling off the Space Needle in one of the most daring stunts I've seen in a long time. But the audience also saw another unidentified man (Bill McKinney) with a gun and a waiter's uniform leaving the scene. Three years later, TV reporter Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) approaches Frady with a half-crazed notion that somebody is methodically killing witnesses. A jump cut to the morgue in which Carter's body is now stored is just the first in a string of surprises awaiting Frady.
- Frady's initial investigations lead him to a small town in the Pacific Northwest where an unfriendly Deputy (Earl Hindman) drags him into a drawn-out barfight that spills into adjacent businesses. Soon after, the charming town sheriff (Kelly Thordsen) lets Frady sample the local fishing just before attempting to shoot him. The next surprise arrives in the form of an exploding boat that takes the life of a seemingly savvy witness (William Daniels) who had long since gone into hiding. Another bomb aboard an airplane doesn't quite achieve its goals, but I'm starting to see a pattern. It takes Frady's apparent death to convince Rintels that there's a story here, but...wait, haven't we seen that coffee delivery man somewhere before? Left on his own, Frady decides to apply to the Parallax Corporation's Division of Human Engineering, which he suspects is employing sophisticated psychological testing to identify and recruit assassins. What could possibly go wrong?
- It's at this point in the story that I feel we could all benefit from a brief video interlude on the subjects of FAMILY, HOME, GOD, AND COUNTRY.
- In what may be the biggest surprise of them all, the audience watches from Frady's perspective as the Parallax Corporation's innocuous training video transforms into an insane brainwashing session peppered with rapidly changing images of Abe Lincoln, Lee Harvey Oswald, The Mighty Thor, various nude forms, and...was that Shane? Regardless, Frady now finds himself compelled to prevent the upcoming assassination of Senator Hammond (Jim Davis), "compelled" being the key word. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Parallax View, however, is that neither Frady nor the audience can be expected to see the whole picture until the film's final moments. Between this, Chinatown (which came out a week after The Parallax View), and Night Moves (which arrived a year later), the mid-70's were a great era for misguided investigators. Throw in Pakula's (and cinematographer Gordon Willis') talents for representing eerie urban spaces and capturing diverging lines on ceilings and roofs, and you have a film that is not quite as good as those other two, but surprisingly worthy of comparison.
- Also featuring Walter McGinn and Anthony Zerbe.
