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Rating: Do you think you're clever, Joe Frady? At the newspaper where you work, everyone will have to acknowledge your talent, you might even enter the race for the Pulitzer Prize. Why hasn't anyone thought, especially after President Nixon's reassuring words ("there is no conspiracy"), that the assassination of Senator Carroll wasn't the work of a deranged lunatic but instead of an elusive organization. Right, because three years after that murder, six witnesses have already disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and your colleague Lee, who was there that day, has just become the seventh, right after she confessed her fears to you.
So tell your editor that you are going to investigate in the snowy Salmontail where the cops don't like nosy people and where you find yourself holding a questionnaire to enter the Parallax Organization, a strange "human resources" company that seems to hire only individuals who meet the requirement of being frustrated and aggressive reactionaries.
The turning point is the death of Tucker, the ex-senator Carroll’s secretary who had been feeling endangered for a long time. And also your "death," because you were in his company when the bomb exploded. But this is also your rebirth with a new name that manages to pass the severe tests of Parallax, hidden among the chrome and impenetrable glass of a common skyscraper.
You're clever, Joe, but your editor Rintels, the only one who knew about your "fake death," is killed, and your tapes with the recordings disappear from the newspaper office, and soon there will be the congress where the new senator Hammond will speak. You are sure that something will happen, so you blend in with the stands: you were right, you sly fellow! Unfortunately, once again, no one will believe it, the funniest thing is that you were tricked like a fool but by now I don't think it matters to you anymore. They will prefer to believe the reassuring words of the president... "There is no conspiracy".
"The Parallax View", in 1974, fits into the trend of those American films that during the post-Watergate seventies express unsettling sensations on the heels of the paranoia generated by John Kennedy's assassination. The idea of a madman who alone shot the president was less fascinating than one that envisaged a conspiracy involving politics, big finance, and organized crime. So no one can say they are safe: bureaucracy is controlling the individual by manipulating their freedom.
Private detective Henry Caul at the end of "The Conversation" by Francis Ford Coppola in the same year found himself frantically dismantling his home searching for non-existent bugs, in Pakula's film the journalist Joe Frady moves in a web, shaking the threads that attract the spider. There's no certainty: the idyllic scene of a natural landscape is revealed to be the decoration of a sofa just as the camera widens the shot. Deception is the strength of a film that Pakula directs with a steady hand after the reflective cult of "Klute" and before the great documentary success of "All the President's Men". Here he attacks in every sequence: car chases, fistfights, exploding boats, the murder sequence on top of the Seattle Space Needle. Still, the suggestive sequence of the psychological test to enter Parallax: a sort of Ludovico treatment with alternating editing up to the paroxysm of images and words like love-mother-father-me-home-country-god-enemy.
And the presence of a loser like Warren Beatty (haunted in "Mickey One", a criminal destined for a bad end in "Bonnie and Clyde", an adventurer swept away by the progress of the mining company in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller") is symptomatic to understand the fatalistic pessimism that constitutes the climax of this great and little-known film.
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