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Director: Alan J. Pakula
Screenwriters: David Giler, Lorenzo Semple Jr, Robert Towne (uncredited), Alan J. Pakula (uncredited)

By Roderick Heath

Alan J. Pakula’s work as a director was often defined by the gulf between the films he’s known for, and all the rest. Pakula stands as virtually synonymous with a type of paranoid, conspiratorial thriller, a reputation that does honour his deepest influence and best work, but also stands in contrast with his attempts to sustain a varied and mature-minded oeuvre. Originally entering the Hollywood system as an assistant in Warner Bros.’ animation department, Pakula quickly proved his worth as a behind-the-camera manager and became regular producing partner to Robert Mulligan. Pakula gained his first Oscar nomination in his mid-30s, producing Mulligan’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s beloved novel To Kill A Mockingbird (1962). Pakula made his first venture as a director with 1969’s The Sterile Cuckoo, a portrait of young college students struggling with their emotional maturing. His second film, Klute (1971), presented an eerie and disorientating melding of character drama and giallo-influenced psycho-thriller. The Parallax View, his third outing, was initially met with mixed reviews and poor box office. But it quickly became a cult object, and so effectively established Pakula’s touch with conjuring an enigmatic and obsessive atmosphere that Robert Redford hired him to direct All The President’s Men (1976), a portrayal of the investigation into Watergate that proved one of the most generally admired films of ‘70s Hollywood.

Afterward Pakula seemed to consciously choose to leave behind thrillers for a time, for an array of personal dramas, but like many directors who had revelled in the openness of ‘70s movie culture, Pakula struggled throughout the 1980s, making several films virtually no-one saw, with only the post-Holocaust drama Sophie’s Choice (1982) gaining real acclaim. Unlike many faltering fellows, however, Pakula resurged with the excellent, moody courtroom drama Presumed Innocent (1990), and whilst his last few films before his death in 1998 were weaker, The Pelican Brief (1993) and The Devil’s Own (1997) rewarded his return to thrillers with high-profile successes. As easily his most famous and admired work, closely joined in style and tone, Klute, The Parallax View, and All The President’s Men represent both crucial unity and divergence. Klute’s focus falls on characters detached from all sense of self and the latter, with its reportorial veracity, contends with individuals at odds with a blank and alien sense of authority as threat. The Parallax View, based on Loren Singer’s novel, mediates as a nominal portrait of post-1960s anxiety and distrust but one driven by an ironic sense of its central character as a portrait in self-delusion, for a film that ruthlessly disassembles the old movie mythology of the fearless reporter. Warren Beatty’s lead performance, one of his best, is characteristic in trying to boil a sense of his character to the essence.

So, in playing reporter Joe Frady, Beatty summarises the character’s motivation and character to a casually hapless admission: “Can’t help it.” He’s clearly a man who’s disappointed and aggravated many of the people who work with him and even those who love him, with a history of abusing the bottle and rubbing editors the wrong way. The Parallax View first truly registers Frady when his colleague and ex-lover Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) gives a rueful smile and refuses to play along with security guards as he tries to get in on a press junket with her (“Is he with you, miss?” “No.”). Frady, Lee, and other journalists are covering the campaign of Senator and Presidential candidate Charles Carroll (William Joyce). As Carroll visits the top of Seattle’s Space Needle, he is shot dead by one man dressed as a waiter (Bill McKinney). But another waiter, Thomas Linder, is the one seen holding a gun and pursued by security, falling to his death after a struggle on the Needle roof. A congressional committee reports that Linder was the lone assassin. Three years later, Lee visits Frady’s apartment in a quietly terrified state, telling him that several of the people who were near to Carroll at the time and counted as witnesses to the killing have died in the interim, including a judge, Arthur Bridges; Lee has been in contact with another witness, Carroll’s smooth and wealthy aide Austin Tucker (William Daniels), who like her suspects an active plot to wipe them all out. Frady can barely take Lee’s story seriously despite his solicitude over her emotional state, but is soon called to identify her body after she turns up dead, supposedly having crashed a car whilst under the influence of drugs.

The Parallax View establishes its odd, oblique, off-kilter rhythm as Pakula’s cool, distanced style depicts Carroll glad-handing and campaigning in the midst of Seattle festivities. Pakula employs little direct dialogue as his camera simply notes his actors at large amidst documentary-like footage of milieu and hoopla. The selection of jostling people around the politician are observed as an organic mass of types exemplifying the familiar paraphernalia of American political life, an event with a surface appearance of being a scrambling, freeform carnival concealing its reality as a carefully ritualised act. Only later do the individuals involved in this scrum of democratic energy and playacting resolve, according to the roles they play in the assassination’s aftershocks. The systematised use of locations to shape the drama is first really noticeable in Pakula’s depiction of Linder’s desperate attempt to escape secret service guards atop the Space Needle, falling over the edge with a desperate scream and the agents: it’s all done in one dizzying shot, the radius of the roof and the panorama of the skyline converging zones of strange space with a hapless human vanishing at the meeting point. Lee’s visit to Frady’s apartment sees them photographed through the blinds of his balcony, at once a suggestively romantic image but also one that’s ghostly, ethereal, transient, anticipating Lee’s death which arrives with brutal force at the very next cut.

Frady has a prickly relationship with his boss, Seattle newspaper editor Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn), who barely tolerates Frady’s shambling persona and tendencies to push patience and licence to a limit. When Frady is first glimpsed after the assassination, he’s harassed and arrested by local cops who want him to give up his sources on a story. Rintels, after getting him released, compares Frady’s liking for stirring up trouble and giving potential news stories a creative push to a comedian who makes fun of people to entertain audience: “They’re amused, but they’re not happy about it.” Later he bitterly accosts Frady after he asks him for money to continue the investigation: “I won’t advance you a dime. I don’t care if your self-serving ambition gets you a paperback sale and a Pulitzer.” “You’re really tired, aren’t ya?” Frady questions by way of retort, writing Rintels off as another ossified remnant getting in the way of his mission to blow the lid off things. Frady’s breezy reasonableness when talking with Lee drives her to the point of becoming distraught. Beatty skilfully puts across Frady’s character, alternating professional savvy and a certain remnant zeal with a dry drunk’s need to perpetually justify himself as the man who’s more authentic and tuned-in than anyone else, with occasional flashes of self-awareness. Frady knows how badly he’s alienated so many people close to him and his attempts to rebuild himself and his reputation ironically test the last few bonds even more.

Cronyn plays a potential cliché – the hard-bitten but likeable editor – with aspects of remnant, potent authority and sorely tested moral resolve as he dresses down Frady, and exhausted acquiescence, perhaps seeing something of himself in the younger man. The low flame of amity he feels for Frady brightens a little as he comes to realise Frady’s really on to something. Both contrast Prentiss’ brief but effective portrait of a soul in a state of true desperation, fully aware she’s going to die and like Cassandra doomed to not be believed. Frady’s sense of personal mission as he sets out to find why she was killed seems genuine, but the truth in Rintels’ assessment of him is visible as his investigation becomes inextricably linked with the expectation the story will bring him rewards and riches, as he blows off an offer from Tucker for money to keep low and quiet. Tucker himself is living in fear, closely watched over by a bodyguard who’s so thorough in tending to his boss’s anxiety he makes Frady go through a full-body search before allowing them to meet. Before encountering Tucker, Frady investigates Judge Bridges’ death, going undercover with false IDs obtained through his friend, the former FBI agent Will Turner (Kenneth Mars), and posing as a “hostile misfit” (“For that, you don’t need an ID,” Turner quips).

Frady visits the small town of Salmontail where he’s bullied in a bar by a sheriff’s deputy, Red (Earl Hindman) over his long hair, sparking a brutal fistfight that Frady wins, impressing the sheriff, Wicker (Kelly Thorsden), who seems to accept Frady’s story of being a friend of Bridges wanting to know how he died. Frady goes fly fishing at the river spot where Bridges was drowned, apparently caught unexpectedly by a discharge of water from a nearby dam, despite the great volume of the sirens warning of the release. Frady is confronted by Wicker with a gun, who seems to intend Frady die the same way, but Frady manages to swat him with his fishing rod and the two men are washed whilst grappling downriver. Frady survives, Wicker does not, and the reporter goes to the sheriff’s house where he discovers strange literature sent out by an organisation called the Parallax Corporation, including a bewildering questionnaire. Frady has to escape Salmontail, stealing Wicker’s police car to elude other cop cars and crashing it into a supermarket, but he manages to slip away and get back in contact with the still-cynical Rintels. Frady talks next to a psychological researcher (Anthony Zerbe), who thinks the Parallax questionnaire is designed to filter for psychopaths and violent types. Frady gets him to school him in the right answers to give to look like a great candidate. When he meets with Tucker on his yacht, Frady barely escapes with his life as the yacht explodes from a planted bomb.

Gordon Willis, who would shoot many of Pakula’s films, had a specific aesthetic and sense of expressivity Pakula was well-attuned to. With his grainy, slightly underexposed images and use of shallow focus, Willis filters the film’s visual experience to match the theme, heroes glimpsed as blotchy manifestations amidst complex and jostling frames or isolated and exposed, a sense of myopic confusion engrained in the very filmic texture. Some of this is based in a wary sense of the contemporary landscape – the soaring reaches of the Space Needle, the wavy, plastic forms of the Parallax headquarters, the blank, drab, voluminous expanse of the hall where a political rally is to unfold, scantly decorated with blocks of patriotic colouring in furniture and decoration. Pakula’s penchant for suggesting hidden patterns through visual cues, exercised more overtly on All The President’s Men, is illustrated here in a scene where a corpse is slumped over at the same angle as the books on a shelf behind, and later scenes where Frady roves around the interior of a building with interiors sliced up into frames within frames like a Mondrian painting, the jangled and compartmentalised reality Frady is exploring realised as well as a dark joke based in the idea of Frady marching towards a frame-up.

The few, spasmodic moments of action are similarly mediated through jagged or layered images. Carroll’s killing is glimpsed through a window of the Space Needle observation deck, spurts of blood appearing on the glass, before Pakula returns inside as people dash to and fro in chaotic reaction, silhouetted and indistinct against the sunlit windows. Frady’s fight with the sheriff breaks up the actual physical conflict into a succession of blurred, obliquely framed actions and very quick glimpses of blood and violence, alternated with calm, distant shots of the water spilling from the floodgates and gushing down river, dragging the two men along. The explosion of Tucker’s yacht is similarly shot from a distance as the craft moves with languorous grace across the water. Moments like this gain a strange kind of impact because Pakula’s carefully modulated approach: innocuous things become charged with a lingering sense of menace, but also dangerous and frightening things come to seem strangely familiar, even humdrum. Parallax employees look like any rank of suited, smooth-talking corporate functionaries.

The Parallax View is usually classified as a political thriller. Certainly it deals with a preoccupation common to both 1973 and today, questioning if the official version of things dealt out to the public is a true one, conveyed here through the narrative’s echoes of the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. Lee and Frady can be seen as exemplary period liberals left bereft and paranoid by the failure of alternative political options leaving the nation mired in Watergate and the last legs of the Vietnam War: Frady expresses this directly as he remembers when “every time you turned around some nut was knocking off one of the best men in the country.” The Parallax View describes a feeling of political void, the ruination of democracy through the systematic removal of its most effectual figures, perhaps indeed to maintain not a party rule or a factional force but to enforce the tyranny of the mundane, to refuse change to exactly the equal and opposite degree people like Lee and Frady want to shake them up. “You move his plate five inches, that boy’s gonna starve to death,” Wicker comments about Red, a throwaway quip that also perhaps nods to this need by the kinds of people who support Parallax to keep things exactly stable, the meal ticket well-filled.

The notion of forces stirring behind the façade of democracy, such as shadowy corporations that have more wealth and immediate power than governments, certainly also raises one of the great worries of contemporary democracy. And yet on other levels The Parallax View not political at all, not in the same way that Mikhail Kalotozov’s I Am Cuba (1964), Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) or Costa-Gavras’ Z (1969) are in contending with real and present contentions in world governance. No real political ideas or concepts are explored or at stake save the broad notion of democracy. In many ways The Parallax View updates the sinister cabals and lurking criminal conspiracies glimpsed in the silent films of Louis Feuillade and Fritz Lang, with shades of Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (1922) and Spione (1928) but without villainous figureheads to embody the evil, as well as the quasi-abstract espionage threats Alfred Hitchcock was fond of. That is to say, like those precursors, it’s more a work of existential anxiety, a feeling of being surrounded and corralled by impersonal, malevolent forces. The storyline rearranges the pictures and themes of John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962), whilst giving them new dimensions. The plot to assassinate a presidential candidate during a political rally in Frankenheimer’s film gives way here to a listless rehearsal in a near-empty space, the booming political speech pre-recorded whilst the candidate holds his place in distracted boredom. Rather than offering a brutal plan to corrupt and shatter the democratic process, The Parallax View offers what we see as another facet of government’s perpetual background drama, real power’s theatrical apparatus, planting seeds or trimming branches where needed.

Most genre films congratulate an audience on letting them identify with canny and competent protagonists. The Parallax View’s storyline has a vital similarity to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man from the previous year, as a cynical moral drama portraying a hero whose faith in his own skills and street smarts proves far too inflated and who ultimately walks easily into a nasty trap he’s been carefully measured for. Like Sgt Howie in Hardy’s film, Frady represents a particularly ripe sacrifice to a dark god because he represents an opposing camp with real but self-deluding passion. Some of All The President’s Men’s potency would stem from the sense of incoherence in power – the seats of authority and its figureheads are all too visible but the minions, the midnight operators, are manifold and insidious, with perhaps even the people nominally in charge of them having no real command. In the end The Parallax View, being fiction, is freer in expostulating a sense of murderous threat, a dark nexus of evildoing which is after a fashion more reassuring as a world-view to some sensibilities.

The inspired notion of a corporation specialising in creating operatives for conspiracy and assassination, a logical confluence of big business amorality and right-wing politics, is employed without being clarified. The film resists to the utmost any temptation to have anyone explain Parallax’s outlook or purpose – the company’s recruiting film suggests aspects of it, but Pakula still leaves it for us to infer to what the corporation is up to and why. The only member of Parallax to speak for himself, recruiting emissary Jack Younger (Walter McGinn), offers Frady in his guise as a good potential applicant, the kinds of opportunities that would sound perfect for a frustrated, self-perceived exile within their own society (of whom the internet has only proven there’s a proliferating number of in recent years), with promises of wealth and adventure based in precisely the characteristics other zones of society have rejected them for. Younger is less a voice of fascist politics than a salesman for a line in self-improvement by radical means. Coscreenwriter David Giler, who would help produce and write Alien (1979), would carry over some of this film’s eerie and paranoid sense of corporate malfeasance to that work. The other credited writer (Robert Towne was hired for polishing) was Lorenzo Semple Jr, whose schooling in writing the Batman TV series emerges during Frady’s fistfight with Red as a mockery of macho brawling.

Frady proves surprisingly adept in fisticuffs and, later, improvising to escape Salmontail by any means necessary, proving that for all Frady’s lacks, physical adeptness and ability under pressure aren’t amongst them. Pakula and the writers are inflect the post-Bullitt (1968) action stuff with a more than faint flicker of absurdity, pitting Frady against small town cops not particularly more able than he is, Frady’s make-it-up-as-you-go action moves and careening driving successful mostly in being fuelled by reactive necessity. Later, as he ventures closer to the true nexus of evil, his instincts fail him as he fails to consider he might be the one being played, even when encountering such happy coincidences as glimpsing Carroll’s assassin in the Parallax headquarters. Then again, Frady’s encounters with various police departments could make a guy cocky. “The truth is they don’t have very bright guys,” Deep Throat tells Bob Woodward in All The President’s Men, hinting heavily that Nixon’s conspiracy comes undone in part because the real world’s villains are often much less competent than they think they are. The Parallax View however articulates a worthy anxiety of encountering an organisation in the world up to no good that really has its shit together.

The Parallax View’s pivotal sequence sees Frady visiting Parallax headquarters after talking with Younger. Frady is left to settle in a large, dark theatre in a chair that seems to be rigged to measure his reactions, and shown a sort of recruiting film. The film flashes up words with potent, straightforward evocations – LOVE, MOTHER, HOME, COUNTRY and so forth, magazine ad images of homey associations of such words mixed in with still from movies like Shane (1953) and patriotic shrines like Mt Rushmore, the word ENEMY illustrated with pictures of Hitler, Mao, and Fidel Castro, HAPPINESS as stacks of coins, good booze, naked women, and so on. As the film goes on, the inferences become darker and the distinctions blurred, becoming a scurrilous satire of sentimental imagery – FATHER becomes associated with Depression-era poverty and gruelling, consuming toil, MOTHER with sorrow and sour regret, COUNTRY with gawking, 3D-glasses wearing voyeurs looking on in detachment at lynching and Ku Klux Klan rallies, as well orgiastic promise, murderers and superheroes. Show business and politics, art and journalism, propaganda and advertising. By the end all binaries and concepts have been churned into a frenetic and indivisible evocation, violent rape and incest, assassination and pornography, riches and power all part of a system of insiders and outsiders, users and the used. This marvellous vignette offers a strong experimental film deployed within a larger commercial movie narrative.

This might even be part of the point for Parallax, reaching for a part of the psyche beyond doubt for a more primal nexus. It suggests something deeply troubling about Parallax’s approach to recruiting its goons – not with overt indoctrination but with images wielded with a mesmeric associative inflection, at once laying bare aspects of their outlook whilst still remaining shrouded in ambiguity. Does Frady pass or fail the implicit test? Is Frady revealed as a phony, or is his inner identity as yet another schmuck who thinks he’s a genius confirmed and prized? Frady at this point has no reason to think Parallax knows who he is, as he’s officially dead after the bombing of Tucker’s yacht – only Rintels knows he’s alive. The most Hitchcockian sequence directly follows the screening as Frady catches sight of Carroll’s assassin, recognised from photos Tucker showed him, leaving the Parallax building, and tracks him to the airport. Frady realises the assassin has placed a bomb hidden in luggage on a plane that has one of the current rival Presidential candidates, Gillingham, as a passenger, but only after he’s trapped aboard. Frady tries to tip off the plane crew to his fear without giving himself away, first writing a message on the toilet mirror and then sneaking a written missive on a napkin so the flight attendants will discover it. This does the trick and everyone is evacuated from the plane moments before it explodes.

When he returns to his grimy rented apartment to resume his assumed identity, Frady is again visitedby Younger who, as Frady expected, has established his identity is false, and Frady now claims to be a man on the run from the police. Meanwhile the assassin poses as a deliveryman to give a poisoned lunch to Rintels, who is found dead in his office the next day: Frady is completely oblivious to his one ally’s death, having sent him a tape recording he made of his talk with Younger. Pakula portrays Rintels’ death first with a sense of low-key tension, drawing out the moment when he’ll consume a meal we know will be the end of him, and then cutting dispassionately to the discovery of his body the next day, a forlorn sight with a sting as Pakula notes the package containing Frady’s tape missing. Frady next follows Younger to a large office and convention centre where it proves a rally for Gillingham’s rival George Hammond (Jim Davis) is being rehearsed. The assassin shoots Hammond as he drives about across the hall in a cart and leaves the rifle at precisely the place Frady has been so expertly lured to. Frady realises, far, far too late, that he’s the patsy for the assassination, witnesses below pointing him out from below and tracking his attempts to escape.

This sequence is a masterful piece of moviemaking that sees Pakula and Willis generating a sense of the nightmarish whilst completely resisting usual methods of creating suspense. The pace of shots stays calm, the framings still often oblique, action viewed from a remove and glimpsed in small portions of the frame. A piece of showmanship put on by the young boosters, flipping around cards that form images of patriotism and great leaders like Washington and Lincoln before arriving at Hammond’s caricatured visage, echoes the Parallax film in proffering calculated iconography as well as Pakula’s segmented visual scheme. Hammond’s cart, its driver slumped and dying, pathetically trundles about, crashing through the neatly arranged furniture. High shots from Frady’s perspective sees a labyrinthine network of shadowy catwalks and gantries, below the brightly lit stadium floor a grid of colourful blossoms on grey concrete, a zone of clandestine criminality lording over the bright clarity of democratic spectacle. Shots from the floor only offer vague glimpses of Frady. Silhouetted Parallax heavies roam like androids in apparently searching for Frady, but really they’re herding him. Michael Small’s subtle, creepy scoring doesn’t overwhelm the ambient noise, which eventually includes ambulances and police cars invading the hall floor, as the great hall becomes a trap where every noise and motion seems amplified.

The camera stays at a distance from the hunters and hunted in the ceiling reaches as they scuttle along gantries: the nominal urgency of the moment is suborned and becomes something more like watching some game of logic being played out with grimly concerted precision. Urgency only comes when a way out suddenly beckons. The open door that represents deliverance to Frady is filled with brilliant, hallucinatory light, and his dash to it filmed from front on in a reversing zoom shot that stretches out the moment in infinite agony – only for a Parallax goon, a figure of black, blank fate, to appear in the frame and blast him dead with a shotgun. The earlier shot of the congressional committee is now reversed, the inevitable report that Frady was Hammond’s killer and denying all conspiracy theories now filmed with the camera drawing out, officialdom shrinking to a paltry block of light in infinite black. The cruel ingenuity of The Parallax View lies in the way the entire narrative has pointed to such an end without giving itself away. But the greater part of its force lies in the way it conceives of political paranoia in essentially mythic terms, a warning about blocs of potential power and disruption in contemporary life that could also be a carefully observed paranoid psychosis in the mind of an assassin. When reality has lost all shape, all faiths and creeds corrupted, reality can be chosen by will.