THE PARALLAX VIEW @ 50

A political assassination. A committee who look like angels of death declare it to be free of conspiracy. We already know better, having seen the professional looking choreography in the opening scene. Three years later, Lee Carter, journalist and witness to the crime visits fellow reporter Joe Frady (also at the assassination) in fear for her life. She shows Frady the list of high profile attendees who have since met violent deaths. Frady dismisses it and sends her on her way. He's looking at her corpse on a slab in the morgue the next day. Begging an advance from his long suffering editor, he goes to a small town in pursuit of another figure under threat, finds him gone. A spoilable scene later and Frady is back on the road with a bundle of documents from an organisation that seems to be recruiting fall guys for political and industrial assassinations. The only way to get into this one is to ... get into it. It's going to be a dark trek.

Alan J. Pakula's paranoia thriller came just after Watergate and the assassinations of the '60s in the U.S. What might have otherwise come across as a tale of political sci-fi now appeared a plausible  scenario. As with his previous Klute, Pakula keeps the histrionics at arm's length and allows the horror of the situation to develop with a workaday pallet and performances that are stronger for their underplaying. By this, he created a genuinely unnerving image of an organisation for hire in quiet control of the government.

This needs good casting if it is to rise above the kind of adolescent conspiracy thinking it suggests and the film's coup was to put Warren Beatty at its centre. Beatty was not only very hot property by the early '70s as the hunque de jour of Hollywood, he was politically active and leaned left: easy on the eye and believable in the field. The star power and the checkout tabloid appeal could keep the most politically apathetic voter rivetted to the story. Beatty even got the character's profession changed from cop to reporter, however grimy the glamour upgrade might have been, it was a better fit. To his credit, Beatty does play this earnestly to the extent that the deeper he gets the more he resembles his cover story characters. The self-isolation he is heading for is clear midpoint and he begins shedding glamour by the scene.

This film is famous for the psyche test scene. Frady sends the creepy questionnaire into the Parallax Corporation and is summoned to their impressive space in a downtown office where he enters a viewing room with a single chair. There are sensors on the arms. A gentle male voice instructs him to sit, keep his hands on the sensors and watch the show. The lights go down and then we see what he is seeing. To call it a slideshow is to under sell it. The Parallax View psyche test is a nightmare of emotional coercion. A series of stills plays out with intertitles suggesting themes like love, mother, me, home, enemy and so on. This is played over a score that goes from the most wholesome country rock imaginable. But this starts changing, the titles and images stop matching, often taking on the opposite of their first iterations. A famous shot of a mother and son goes from the intended warmth to a disturbing smirk at a child's torment. The enemy might start with images of Hitler or Castro but it comes back as a superhero or a group of affectionate friends. If you had thought the written test was disturbing this show will have you white knuckled.

I have encountered a theory that Parallax are not looking for high emotion in the test results but the impassivity of  the truly dangerous. This is pretty scary and might still work but, considering the opening scenes of assassination and the chase of the perpetrator, the recruitment program might well have a built-in disposal system.

I mentioned the score just then and need to address it. Michael Small's music for The Parallax View is extraordinary. Two contrary motifs weave into each other. The first uses the major thirds and drops to a fourth of military or patriotic music like the bugle tune Taps or The Last Post. The second is a series of dissonant tight intervals played high on a piano keyboard. They have the troubling, unresolved feel of mystery movies. Small introduces both at once in the opening shot of the Congressional committee as the camera tracks closer to them. A pedal note or drone, if you will, holds as the second motif plinks above it. As the leader of the committee reads the final statement, French horns quietly begin the first motif but with a more sinister harmony in the lower strings. The two are woven effortlessly, patriotism and intrigue until, by the time the credits have run they feel like one piece of music. The remainder of the score allows for expansion but retains its character. At one moment the strings playing the dissonant motif threaten to turn into a hoedown but it's just a very brief signalling moment. At another, a sombre scene is filled with the patriotic motif where another composer of this era would have put something more jarring. By keeping in close touch with his material, Small maintains integrity with a film score many have sought to evoke but few come close. Small never bettered it.

As he had done with intrigue in Klute, Pakula brought the political thriller into the new decade and did so at a point where it's really only the differing technology that distinguishes it from recent cinema. John Frankenheimer's earlier Manchurian Candidate covered similar territory but it responded to paranoia in the system. The Parallax View plugs into the community's unease at finding itself at a time when the best were murdered and the worst celebrated while the crooked presided and a bad war seemed to go on forever. Parallax was a service and the question of who was using it remains unanswered. 

While we see the intimidating office complexes and feel our flesh creep at the recruiter Younger gently croon reassurance to his potentially explosive candidate, and the wowing deep focus shots of the finale, we also move through the look and feel of the everyday. Coppola had done this for organised crime with the Godfather, Friedkin for horror in The Exorcist, and Scorsese with Mean Streets, Sidney Lumet would manage it for broadcasting in Network despite a wildly over-literate screenplay. The decade by 1974 had already proved this approach appealed to a community who hungered for the truth of an experience at the cinema. This one gave them the heebie jeebies. It's still scary.

Viewing notes: I watched my Criterion blu-ray of this but the local release on Imprint is more affordable (and might well be the same transfer) with more extras.