Although less well-known than director Alan Pakula’s next film, All the President’s Men, The Parallax View shares some of the same atmosphere. Warren Beatty stars as Joseph Frady, a second-tier reporter who gets wrapped up in what at first appears to be a cover-up of an assassination of a popular senator, but which takes on darker implications the deeper he digs. Echoes of the Kennedy and King murders haunt the story and, along with Pakula’s association with Men, it is easy to understand why the film is thought of as a political thriller.
But if it is one, it is one without politics. While most of the victims are politicians or people close to them, their politics are never elaborated, nor is there is any personal or ideological animus at work. In fact, two of the targets are political rivals. Their shared nemesis is the impersonal Parallax Corporation, which is like Jack London’s assassination bureau dressed in contemporary dread. The smarmy henchmen of Parallax will apparently kill anyone for the right price, though we never know who is behind what. The cheap assumption seems to be that if a corporation is involved, it must be evil and that no further explanation is necessary.
Helped considerably by cinematographer Gordon Willis’s penchant for barely lit set-ups, Pakula sustains a tense, threatening mood for a story that barely makes sense as even a tendentious allegory. Typically for a ’70s film, a lot of realistic atmosphere surrounds the “political” scenario, but the “thriller” aspects tend to undercut the ruminative menace. In one sequence, for example, Frady barely escapes an attempt on his life by a backwoods sheriff, leading to a stock cops-and-robbers chase complete with squealing tires and barely-avoided traffic accidents. The action is handled with considerable skill, but it is obviously an attempt to jack up the otherwise brooding movie with debatably appropriate thrills.
Such disconnected events hold together only as much as we can sympathize with Frady, and there is little effort to make him attractive. His frowzy self-pity and obnoxious aggression win him few friends in or out of the movie. As he escapes one murderous encounter after another, he is practically a walking hazard that should wear a sign warning to “Stay Clear!” The only real suspense occurs when he tries to notify an airline flight crew that there is a bomb on board without panicking everyone else. Perversely funny, the sequence is also unfortunately typical of the patchy narrative construction, since the writers get Frady on the plane only with some heavy, laborious contrivance.
Pakula and his collaborators were probably trying to use conventional generic situations to make troubling resonances more believable and accessible. Unfortunately, the murky motivation, realistic texture and out-sized action produce a muddle. The results are not corrupt or inept, but the fabricated paranoia of The Parallax View never measures up to the makers’ presumed ambitions, much less confront the realities of political violence.