TV journalist Lee Carter witnesses the assassination of U.S. senator and presidential aspirant Charles Carroll atop the SeattleSpace Needle. The apparent shooter, a waiter, is chased, but falls to his death, while the actual killer, disguised as a waiter, vanishes in the chaos. An investigation by an official panel attributes the killing to a single man who acted alone.
Three years later, Carter visits ex-boyfriend Joe Frady, an investigative newspaper reporter in Oregon. She tells him that six witnesses to the assassination have since died and she fears she will be next. Soon after, Carter is found dead from an alcohol and barbiturate drug overdose in a suspected suicide.
Feeling guilty about disregarding Carter's pleas and suspicious of her sudden death, Frady goes to the nearby small town of Salmontail to probe the drowning death of Judge Arthur Bridges, another witness to Carroll's assassination. The local sheriff, Wicker, offers Frady his assistance and escorts him to the dam where Bridges met his fate to investigate. As its floodgates open, Wicker pulls his gun on Frady.
After a desperate struggle in which the sheriff drowns, Frady escapes in the sheriff's squad car and races to the sheriff's home. There, he uncovers documents from the Parallax Corporation, an organization recruiting "security" operatives. Later, Frady contacts a local psychology professor, Nelson Schwartzkopf, who assesses a Parallax personality test taken from Wicker's desk. He deems it a profiling exam to identify homicidal psychopaths.
Austin Tucker, an aide to Carroll and witness to his assassination, agrees to meet Frady. He reveals there have been two attempts on his life since Carroll's murder. He has identified that another waiter was involved in the assassination and shows a slide image of him to Frady. Shortly after, a bomb goes off on his yacht, killing Tucker and his bodyguard. Sitting on the bow away from the blast, Frady is blown into the water and is also presumed dead by the authorities. He swims ashore and tells his editor, Bill Rintels, he will use his apparent death as cover for applying to Parallax Corp. under an alias.
Days later, Parallax official Jack Younger contacts Frady to tell him Parallax has accepted him for training. On his first visit to its Los Angeles headquarters, the corporation measures Frady's reactions as he watches a montage of disturbingly edited and subliminal still photographs and images that juxtapose pro- and anti-American attitudes. After leaving the offices, Frady spots the fake waiter at the offices and then trails this Parallax operative to Hollywood Burbank Airport, where the man sends a bomb aboard a passenger jet in the checked baggage.
Believing the Parallax operative has boarded the jet, Frady also boards the plane but cannot find him, spotting instead another United States senator who, like the ill-fated Carroll, is now considering running for president. Frady surreptitiously passes a note on a paper napkin to flight attendants about the bomb, and the jet returns safely to the airport and is evacuated just before it explodes.
Back at his apartment, Frady is confronted by Younger about his fake alias, but mollifies him with a cover story. Later, at the newspaper office, Rintels listens to a recording of the conversation between Frady and Younger. He then places it in an envelope with other recordings. That evening, he is poisoned by the same Parallax assassin – from the Space Needle shooting and the plane bombing – disguised as a deli delivery boy dropping off dinner, and when Rintels's body is discovered the recordings have vanished.
Frady flies out to the Parallax headquarters in Atlanta, where he has been assigned to a security position. There, he follows the same Parallax operative to a large exhibit hall, where a dress rehearsal for a political rally is underway. This is for another presidential aspirant, Senator George Hammond. Frady chases the operative and watches from the hall's catwalks as Hammond drives toward the exit in a golf cart. The Senator is then fatally shot by an unseen sniper.
Frady finds the rifle lying on the catwalks but is spotted on the catwalk and falsely identified as the shooter. Realizing too late he is being set up to be framed as a scapegoat for the shooting, he attempts to flee, but is shot and killed at the exit by a security man. Six months later, another official investigative committee reports that Frady was a paranoid lone gunman who killed Hammond out of a misguided sense of patriotism.
Cast
Warren Beatty portrayed the protagonist Joseph Frady.
Frady is often filmed from great distances, suggesting that he is being watched.[3]
Montage
Most of the images used in the assassin training montage were of anonymous figures or important historical figures, featuring among others Richard Nixon, Adolf Hitler, Pope John XXIII, and Lee Harvey Oswald (the photograph that captures the moment Oswald is shot). The montage also uses drawings by Jack Kirby from Marvel Comics' Thor. They are juxtaposed with caption cards showing the words 'LOVE', 'MOTHER', 'FATHER', 'HOME', 'ENEMY', 'HAPPINESS', and 'ME'. The montage "captures the confusion of post-Kennedy America" by demonstrating the decay of values and longstanding traditions.[5] It has been compared to the brainwashing scene in Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange.[6][5]
Critical reception
At the time of its release, The Parallax View received mixed reactions from critics, but the film's reception has been more positive in recent years. On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 87% based on 45 reviews, with an average rating of 7.8/10. The site's critics consensus says, "The Parallax View blends deft direction from Alan J. Pakula and a charismatic Warren Beatty performance to create a paranoid political thriller that stands with the genre's best."[7] On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 65 out of 100 based on 12 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[8]
Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three out of four stars upon its release. While Beatty offered a good performance in an effective if predictable thriller, Ebert said the actor was not called upon to exercise his full talents. Ebert also noted similarities to the 1973 film Executive Action, but said Parallax was "a better use of similar material, however, because it tries to entertain instead of staying behind to argue."[9] In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "Neither Mr. Pakula nor his screenwriters, David Giler and Lorenzo Semple, Jr., display the wit that Alfred Hitchcock might have used to give the tale importance transcending immediate plausibility. The moviemakers have, instead, treated their central idea so soberly that they sabotage credulity."[10]Joseph Kanon of The Atlantic found the film's subject pertinent: "what gives the movie its real force is the way its menace keeps absorbing material from contemporary life."[11]
Time magazine's Richard Schickel wrote, "We would probably be better off rethinking—or better yet, not thinking about—the whole dismal business, if only to put an end to ugly and dramatically unsatisfying products like The Parallax View."[12]
In 2006, Entertainment Weekly critic Chris Nashawaty wrote, "The Parallax View is a mother of a thriller... and Beatty, always an underrated actor thanks (or no thanks) to his off-screen rep as a Hollywood lothario, gives a hell of a performance in a career that's been full of them."[13]
Alexander Kaplan at Film Score Monthly wrote, "Beatty brought his relaxed, low-key charm[,] making his character’s fate even more shocking, while the supporting cast provided ... memorable performances, including Paula Prentiss’s heartbreakingly terrified reporter[.] ... Pakula observed that Frady 'imagines the most bizarre kind of plots, (but) is destroyed by a truth worse than anything he could have imagined.' The film’s ending ... suggests that Parallax may have been onto Frady the whole time, another subversion of his heroic status. Even the hero’s name is unheroic, 'Joe Frady' suggesting a mocking mixture of Dragnet’s Joe Friday and the schoolyard taunt [']fraidy cat.'"[14]
Reviewing films depicting political assassination conspiracies for The Guardian, director Alex Cox called the film the "best JFK conspiracy movie".[15] Film critic Matt Zoller Seitz has called it "a damn near perfect movie".[16]
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