THE PARALLAX VIEW: Blu-ray (Paramount, 1974), Criterion

It was an age of uncertainty in American politics, perhaps to have bred a decade’s worth of shadowy tales about government conspiracies – or perhaps, merely the dawn of an awakening for the naïve masses, brought out from under the aftershocks of an abhorrent Presidential assassination, casting its uneasy pall upon the fruited landscape of American optimism begun, innocuously enough, with a presumed goodwill tour in Dallas in 1963, and ostensibly to end with an even more obscene coup d'état inside the Ambassador Hotel 5-years later. The bookended murders of the Kennedy brothers were only the beginning, the sixties, rocked by the blatant slayings of Malcolm X (1965) and Martin Luther King (1968), the advancing darkness of unseen forces, scheming to silence those who would oppose their unseen agenda, steadily roiling in the background, preceded by the now almost forgotten ‘mysterious death’ of Italian politico, Enrico Mattei and celluloid sexpot, Marilyn Monroe, both in 1962.  But perhaps the most morbidly intriguing of the lot was the untimely ‘death’ of then noted, and thoroughly ambitious American journalist, Dorothy Mae Kilgallen, a main staple on TV’s popular game show, What's My Line?, whose probative work on JFK’s public execution afforded her unprecedented access to Jack Ruby - the small-time hustler, seemly out to spare Jackie Kennedy the thought-numbing ordeal of having to endure a lengthy trial for her husband’s ‘presumed’ killer. What Ruby said to Kilgallen, we will never know. For although Kilgallen had covered her bases by creating two sets of interview notes – one, at her immediate disposal, the other entrusted to a loyal friend – on November 8, 1965, Kilgallen’s body was discovered inside her fashionable Manhattan townhouse, dead of an apparent overdose of barbiturates mixed with alcohol – neither of which, in life, she was known to consume in excess. A skeptic of the Warren Commission’s Lee Harvey Oswald/lone gunman theory, it was rumored Kilgallen had definitive proof from Ruby that would have otherwise blown the murder investigation of the President wide open. Alas, the day after Kilgallen’s demise, her ‘friend’ with the second dossier on Jack Ruby suddenly succumbed to ‘leukemia’. Kilgallen’s files on Ruby were not found among either woman’s possessions, and Ruby, who continued to press Earl Warren to take him to Washington to testify and expose everything, instead died in his cell ‘from cancer’ in 1967. And if you believe any of this at face value, then you’ve already consumed far too much of the state-sanctioned Kool-Aid to appreciate what is to follow.

Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) is a bone-chilling, if not entirely satisfying movie, and not necessarily for what is being represented on the screen within its slender 102 min. runtime. The heads of this conspiratorial consortium are, in fact, never revealed. Our hero, probing newspaper hound, Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty) is murdered, then branded as a lone assassin. The omnipotent governmental agencies, assigned to investigate, instead pay short shrift to not one, but two politically motivated assassinations – the first, Senator Charles Carroll (Bill Joyce), shot by a waiter atop Seattle’s Space Needle during a fundraiser, the second, incumbent, George Hammond (Jim Davis) during a rehearsal of his ‘never to be’ public rally. The Parallax View does more than suggest the government is in cahoots with this never to be exposed corporate entity (a sort of operating school for assassins). But The Parallax View is even more disturbing because the age of sinister ‘pretend’ merely hypothesized in this movie, where such organizations, dedicated to establishing a reasonable facsimile in lieu of the truth, perhaps still considered fanciful to downright silly back in the seventies, has since come to pass. Think me crazy? Then, consider Edward Snowden, a subcontracted CIA whistleblower, who copied and leaked highly classified documents exposing the National Security Agency’s (NSA) intricate cartel of spies. Until Snowden, these flew under the cover of Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with a complicit network of telecommunication companies and European governments at their disposal. Palantir? CrowdStrike? Stratfor?  We are living in that dangerously dark quicksilver stopgap where privately held consortiums not only hoard vast storehouses of our ‘private’ information (‘private’ being a relative term), but, with an insidious ability, nee desire – and complicity of the very agencies once designed to protect us – reshape and disseminate it as a substitute for reality, marketed and sold to the public as gospel rather than gossip; a mercurial futurism, so transparently ‘in our face’ as to still allow it to promulgate, yet be dismissed from our conscious belief of its existence.   

The Parallax View is, of course, loosely based on the novel by Loren Singer. While the movie, Executive Action, made and released just one year prior, dared to cast Hollywood stalwarts, Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan as co-conspirators in the actual Presidential assassination, ended with a list of eighteen material witnesses to meet with their own untimely demise, Pakula and screenwriters, David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr. (with an uncredited assist from Robert Towne) have elected to forgo any further probe into the Kennedy murders at the crux of Singer’s novel. It remains unclear whether Pakula was ‘encouraged’ by Paramount or ‘other’ outside sources, not to delve into the real-life case, or if Pakula, working backwards from this cynical fascination, simply felt too much had already been written and played out to beat the proverbial ‘dead horse’ yet again. For certain, the writer’s strike impacted his production. With its ‘play or pay’ contractual obligations to star, Warren Beatty (meaning that, regardless of whether or not Beatty worked, he was still owed his salary), Pakula ventured on The Parallax View without a finished screenplay, improvising whole scenes and dialogue, and, heavily in discussions with cinematographer, Gordon ‘prince of darkness’ Willis, on how best to shoot, or at least ‘aim’ for some sort of visual ‘continuity’ where none otherwise existed.  

Pakula does, in fact, get a lot of mileage from his combined homage to the historical facts. Indeed, the opening murder of the fictional Sen. Carroll, shot by an assassin (Bill McKinney) posing as a waiter, is framed by Carroll’s proud entrance atop a convertible in a parade-styled motorcade. Stop me if this doesn’t sound all too familiar.  The actual shooting veers even closer to mimic the particulars of Robert Kennedy’s final moments, down to the inclusion of a female extra attired in polka-dots, ducking for cover. Reportedly, seconds after RFK’s murder a woman in a polka-dot dress was witnessed racing through the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel, gleefully shouting “we got him!” This incident, all references to it, and, the notion the murder might have been orchestrated by a syndicate, determined never to have another Kennedy in the White House, was dismissed, then expunged outright as pure poppycock with virtually all blame immediately shifting to trigger-man, Palestinian Christian militant, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. In The Parallax View, Pakula also pays a subtler homage to Lee Harvey Oswald, the patsy in this fictionalized scenario, another waiter, waving, but never having fired, a gun, chased to the perilously smooth rooftop of the Space Needle, only to be thrown off it by a trio of never-to-be-identified ‘agents’ working for…?!?  

This opening sequence in The Parallax View, begun with Pakula and Willis comparing the ancient totems of Native Peoples to the Space Needle, a totem of post-modern invention, is of such a visualized perfection, supremely to carry off its heightened paranoia, the movie really has nowhere to go except into a slow, if sustained downward spiral, intermittently resurrected with a few minor curiosities, a couple of good scenes, and, one ridiculously out-of-touch inserted car chase. In the opener, we are also introduced to TV reporter, Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) and Carroll’s press secretary, Austin Tucker (William Daniels). Both bear witness to the crime at close range. Immediately following the incident, we regress to a ‘Warren’ styled commission, appointed to investigate. The commission finds no conspiracy beyond the body of the waiter thrown from the Space Needle – deemed the lone gunman. Three years elapse. We meet reporter, Joe Frady, who sneaks into a known drug house to await the police ambush of its occupants. Joe’s editor, Bill Rintel (Hume Cronyn) is wholly unimpressed. Six years ago, he fired Joe for his erratic alcoholism, but also for his pit bull-like chutzpah for pursuing stories of interest, with or without Rintel’s complicity. Now, Rintel encourages Joe to take a break from reporting, at least until the ‘heat’ from his latest kerfuffle with the law has died down.

Returning to his apartment, Joe finds Carter frantically waiting on his patio with a whale of a tale. Someone is trying to kill her. Worse, the same unseen forces are systemically picking off any material witnesses to Carroll’s assassination from three years ago. Joe, formerly Carter’s lover, now refuses to believe her story. She reveals to him that since Carroll’s murder, 6 of the attendees to the crime have died under mysterious circumstances, the latest Judge Arthur Bridges in a town called Salmontail. Joe is marginally sympathetic but does nothing. A short while later, Carter is killed, her autopsied remains revealing a lethal cocktail of barbiturates and alcohol. Feeling guilty over Carter’s death, Joe goes to Salmontail and is almost immediately confronted in a bar room brawl by boorish, Deputy Red (Earl Hindman), under the watchful eye of Sheriff L.D. Wicker (Kelly Thordsen). Pulverizing Red, and damn near destroying the entire honky-tonk and its adjacent gift shop in the process, Joe is taken under Wicker’s wing. Wicker suggests he has a friend who works at the dam who may be able to shed new light on the Judge’s death. The next day, Wicker meets Joe, fishing pole in hand, precisely at the spot near the base of the dam where Bridges was drowned. Joe makes several more inquiries as to how Bridges could have been so stupid as to stand at the base of a dam about to release its spill-off. At this juncture, the dam’s warning siren breaks into its shrill call. Joe now realizes Bridges could not have ‘not’ known what was about to happen, and worse, acknowledges Wicker has brought him here to kill him too. The men struggle, and Joe narrowly escapes a similar fate, while Wicker is swept downstream, presumably left to drown.

Stealing Wicker’s police cruiser, Joe drives to the Sheriff’s home where he discovers psychological testing and confirmation documents citing Wicker as a newly hired member of the mysterious Parallax Corporation. Before he can investigate further, Deputy Red enters the room Not knowing Joe is in the adjacent study, Red takes a phone call, alerting him Wicker has drowned, his remains dredged from the river. How then is Wicker’s car parked out front? Observing Joe climbing down the balcony and racing back to Wicker’s cruiser, Red makes chase. Joe loses control of his vehicle and plows into a local supermarket, fleeing on foot and managing to take refuge in the back of a pickup truck leaving down the back alley undetected. Joe again attempts to get Rintel interested in his findings, but to no avail. Instead, Joe contacts Professor Nelson Schwartzkopf (Anthony Zerbe) who reasons the highly complex ‘personality test’ administered by the Parallax Corp. was meant to identify psychopathic traits in an individual for their recruitment. Now, Joe is approached by Austin Tucker’s aide (William Jordan), informed Tucker will talk to him, but only after he is strip-searched for concealed weapons. Begrudgingly, Joe agrees to this invasive procedure.  

Austin, Joe and the aide board Tucker’s yacht and set sail for open waters. But only a short while after Joe has shown Tucker photos of the waiter at the Space Needle, the yacht is engulfed in a series of hellish explosions. Tucker and his aide are instantly killed. But Joe narrowly escapes by leaping overboard. That evening, Joe returns to his newspaper, startling Rintel with his uncanny knack for survival. Joe implores Rintel not to expose him, but rather, to write his obituary to solidify for these unseen assailants he too perished by their handiwork. Reluctantly, Rintel agrees. Now, Joe applies to the Parallax Corporation under an assumed identity. He is introduced to Jack Younger (Walter McGinn) who invites Joe to partake in a more deeply rooted psychological test, conducted by flashing various images on a screen, increasingly to take a more dark and perverted view of humanity at large. Afterward, Joe is instructed by Younger he has ‘passed’ the test. But Joe also witnesses the waiter from the Space Needle – Carroll’s assassin – working for Parallax.  Following the assassin, Joe observes as he retrieves an attaché from his car, drives to the airport, and, check the attaché as stowed baggage on a commercial passenger jet about to take off. Joe boards the plane, taking notice of a prominent senator and realizes another assassination is afoot. Alerting staff to the bomb already on board, the plane makes a successful landing on the tarmac and is evacuated moments before the attaché explodes.

Returning to his apartment, Joe is confronted by Younger who has found out Joe’s true identity. Joe suggests he applied to Parallax under an assumed name, as his own is already well-known to the local police. Unbeknownst to Younger, their entire conversation is being taped by Joe who, later, places this vital evidence in Rintel’s care. Alas, after listening to the tapes, Rintel is poisoned by the senator’s assassin and the tapes disappear. Joe goes to Parallax’s corporate offices to attend Younger, but is informed he is not there, even though Joe has just witnessed him leaving the building. Now, Joe follows Younger to the convention center where a dress rehearsal for Sen. George Hammond’s political rally that same evening is taking place. Hammond goes through the motions of the planned rally as Joe quietly observes several Parallax agents, posing as ‘security’ climb into the auditorium’s catwalks. Skulking about the scaffolding, Joe is too late to prevent Hammond from being assassinated. As an ambulance and police cars descend upon the auditorium, one of the attendee’s mistakes Joe for the killer. Realizing Parallax has set him up, Joe races for the exit, only to be gunned down by the real assassin posing as ‘security’. The movie ends with the same committee to have investigated Carroll’s murder, now concluding Joe Frady was a deeply disturbed and obsessed lone gun man, responsible for Hammond’s death out of a warped sense of patriotism, ensuring Parallax’s autonomy will endure and continue to proliferate.  

One of The Parallax View’s most compelling sequences is set at Gorge Dam, an ominous grey monolith, superbly photographed by Gordon Willis, with almost the entire sequence unconventionally framed using a long lens in shallow focus from a considerable distance, allowing the audience to experience Joe’s isolation as he realizes Sheriff Wicker is preparing to kill him. There are several such moments where Pakula achieves an incredibly riveting sense of pure, undiluted dread. Alas, these moments are counterbalanced by a rather lax inclusion of others, strip-mined from Hollywood’s playbook of rank cliché, presumably designed on the fly to compensate for Pakula, working from an incomplete, and as yet, un-formed idea of where his story is headed. Herein, the car chase, culminating with Joe’s predictable and convenient escape, comes immediately to mind, as does the bar room altercation between Joe and Deputy Red – done in a sort of ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ tongue-in-cheek aggressiveness (albeit, a full 3 years before Smokey and the Bandit hit movie screens) fully observed, but never quite commented upon by the spectator class populating the scene. Instead, everyone, from the busty cowgirl-inspired waitresses, to a gnarled old woman and her fragile husband (stock comedy relief) buying souvenir postcards in the adjacent gift emporium, simply take in the carnage and destruction in a ‘matter of fact’ stride. Is this meant to be funny? If so, lighter moments are decidedly not the métier, either of Pakula or this movie, which possesses an unrelentingly bleak and apocalyptic view of one man’s inescapable fate – destined to fall victim to an omnipotent organization, still in the process of rubbing out all tangible witnesses to a crime committed three years earlier.

The other interminable misfire in the picture is the Parallax Corporation’s litmus test, done entirely in one uninterrupted montage featuring inserts of President Richard Nixon, Adolf Hitler, Pope John XXIII, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the comic superhero, Thor, interpolated with title cards reading ‘Mother’, ‘Father’, ‘Love’, ‘Enemy’ and ‘Me’, and other images of grandfatherly/motherly types, warm sunsets, the American flag and Statue of Liberty, young couples in various stages of undress, and, finally, a chorine of gay hustlers, smoking cigars and proudly showing off their naked buttocks, meant to illustrate America’s moral decline in values and longstanding traditions. Gee, where have we seen some of this more recently?!? The sequence, while startling in its own right, is 3-interminable minutes of delayed reaction, with never an insert to illustrate Joe’s commentary to the images. This is as Pakula had wished. However, it literally stops the show…and not in a good way.

Upon its release, The Parallax View was not altogether well-received, particularly in an era where such hauntingly relayed tales of surveillance were in abundance. In hindsight, the picture is an experimentally odd and uneven mixture of paranoia and suspense, infrequently to mislay its anchor of plausibility. Warren Beatty’s performance is solid. But he ought to have been given at least one noble counterpart to spark off his mounting suspicions about The Parallax Corporation. As the heads of this counterintelligence organization are never seen, much less exposed in their crimes, the movie is left without an easily identifiable villain. The organizations’ mindless cohorts, who filter in and out with unquestioning fidelity to bosses unknown, repeatedly, and clumsily foiled by Joe, are monolithic and monosyllabic figures, robotic in their adherence to chaos without actually comprehending what all the mayhem is pointing towards.  So, in the end we are left with a movie about a high-priced organization who employs a lot of ‘dim bulbs’ just bright enough to be illuminated by their own hatred for humanity at large. None of the assassins in The Parallax View reveal themselves as of the ‘pro’ class; merely, as rank amateurs with a vengeful axe to grind.  While Pakula is exceptionally well-versed at how to keep this menace alive and centrally focused in the picture, he is not entirely able to go anywhere beyond the ugly theatrics that quickly unravel the plot into a series of duck and cover scenarios for our nominal hero. Joe merely blunders his way into this fray. And it costs him his life in the end.

The Parallax View arrives on Blu-ray via Criterion, sporting a new 4K scan performed by Paramount Pictures. Aside: it is gratifying to see Paramount doing some solid work on their back catalog again. I sincerely hope they keep it up. The Parallax View on Blu is best absorbed in a thoroughly darkened room. The subtlest play of light and shadow is revealed in this 1080p scan. The color palette is fairly bleak and muddy, skewing towards brown/beige/yellow, but in keeping with the original design, with only a few splashes of vibrant reds and neon greens to recommend it. Gordon Willis’ highly stylized images, herein, look utterly fantastic. Owing to film stocks of the day, the image is wonderfully thick, with oodles of well-formulated grain. Given that this is Willis, the image is also exceptionally dark, revealing only the stark, necessary elements to make the scene work. If nothing else, The Parallax View contains some of the most startling ‘establishing long shots’ in cinema history, adding to the contemporary strain of fringe isolation our character is feeling. Good stuff here. This disc has also been afforded a new 5.1 DTS. And while competently rendered, you aren’t watching The Parallax View for its sound design. Michael Small’s sparsely populated underscore is the real benefactor here. Dialogue is clean and precise, while exhibiting that overall early-70’s dated quality. Extras include a fascinating 15-minute overview by filmmaker, Alex Cox, vintage interviews with Pakula from 1974 (18 min.) and 1995 (6 min.), 18-minutes with cinematographer, Gordon Willis, and an interview with assistant, Jon Boorstin (15-mins.). There is also an excellent critical essay by Nathan Heller to include a reprint of a 1974 interview with Pakula. If I have a single complaint regarding Criterion’s spate of extras, it’s that all of them seem to be interrupted at precisely the moment when they begin to really get interesting. I could have listened to Cox and Boorstin for easily a half-hour more each. They seem to want to share so much more, but then the screen suddenly fades to black and the credits appear.  Bottom line: The Parallax View is today, far more justly regarded as one of the great paranoia thrillers of the 1970’s. That reputation doesn’t entirely hold up. But there is enough here to make it a fascinating viewing experience, if not entirely one you will want to revisit again and again.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

3

VIDEO/AUDIO

4.5

EXTRAS

3.5