Three years after the assassination of a popular Presidential Candidate, people who were there start dying under mysterious circumstances. Enter ambitious reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) to figure out what's going on and how this might all connect to The Parallax Corporation.
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Like many film fanatics I'm prone to falling down rabbit holes. Sometimes it's a director, sometimes an actor, sometimes a genre. I have no control over it. I see a film or hear/read about something I want to know more about and then all of a sudden I am overtaken with the need to consume it whole. My latest obsession has been paranoid thrillers made between the late 60's and the early 80's.
By and large I find these films to be a pretty satisfying genre. Sure there's the occasional dalliance with by-the-numbers predictability and self-righteous earnestness (Three Days Of The Condor) but most are pleasurably taut exercises in cynicism and paranoia. The Parallax View is thankfully one of the latter.
At the start I was expecting something akin to my Condor experience only this time with Warren Beatty looking all rakish and socially minded. Fortunately this film was shot and directed by Gordon Willis and Alan J. Pakula. Their dark and distant aesthetic boarders on the experimental and virtually removes Beatty from the film all together while at the same time giving an eerie air to all of the proceedings. Who would have thought that long-shots of red, white and blue tables could illicit such chilling unease in an audience? Gordon and Alan did, and God bless them for it.
Bonus points for the presence of Thor in the brainwash montage!
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