By the mid-1970's, the movies dove into this pool of paranoia deeply, creating a singularly unique thriller sub-genre.....conspiracy-Noir. With films like "The Conversation", "Chinatown", and "3 Days Of The Condor", our favorite leading men uncovered, raged, and then uselessly fought against diabolic Powers-That-Be who were indestructible and impervious to exposure or damage. No light at the end of the tunnel ever glimmered for our would-be heroes....the finales of these movies left them demoralized, disillusioned......and sometimes as dead as a beloved public figure shot by a commission-declared 'lone' gunman.
"The Parallax View", directed by Alan Pakula, still holds on to its reputation as the best of these films. Spare and precise in its atmosphere of suffocating tension, it deliberately moves like a broad-daylight waking nightmare to its foregone conclusion. You know where it's going from the start....with an RFK-type assassination atop the Seattle Space Needle by some crazed loon posing as a waiter. But wait....who's that other creepy looking waiter skulking around? (It can't bode well, since he's played by Bill MckInney, one of the 'Deliverance' backwoods rapists)
When witnesses to this shooting start dropping dead from accidents or supposed natural causes, one of these terrified survivors (Paula Prentiss) appeals to glib investigative reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) for help. He doubts her until she too ends up on a slab. Frady goes undercover to dig up whatever's going on, narrowly escaping contrived 'accidental' deaths arranged for both him and any unfortunate soul he interviews. All these twisted, potentially lethal paths finally lead him to the gleaming glass and concrete HQ of the Parallax Corporation.......the Parallax mission: recruit and train angry, outcast, dumb-as-a-rock patsies to take the fall (sometimes literally) for special-order political assassinations. While cops and secret service agents busy themselves shooting down the hapless Parallax shmuck, the real Parallax shooter (that other suspicious waiter we saw at the beginning) has already done the deed and gotten away with it.
Beatty poses as a Parallax recruit, and to test his suitability as a violence-prone dupe, they strap him to a chair, visually force feeding him a clever video mash-up of comforting and ominous imagery.......watching it today, it plays like visual representation of a typical Trump rally......
We'll say no more at this point.....except that considering its genre and the era surrounding it, the film concludes with exactly the ironic kick-in-the-teeth you would expect of it......or as it was bluntly explained to Jack Nicholson..."it's Chinatown, Jake."
And ironies of ironies, the suspenseful skill he displayed in assembling 'The Parallax View' earned Pakula the premier directing assignment of his career, 1976's "All The President's Men". In that film, he had the ultimate, ominous Powers-That-Be thriller.......instead of frightening fictional villains, Pakula could now employ his actors to portray real-life plotters.....the sad, conniving collection of Nixonian minions. Even better, of all the 70's paranoia parade movies......this one featured a truly rare occurrence - for once, a vanquishing of villainy.
As for "The Parallax View", it stays with us always as a signature, unsettling touchstone of uneasy times. It is the decision of The Honorable BQ Committee On Conspiracy-Noir that this great thriller stands guilty of 4 stars.(****)
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