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VINTAGE MOVIES

Vintage Movies: “The Parallax View”

MAGNET contributing editor Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 100 titles—from the ’20s through the ’80s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every week.

The Parallax View (1974, 102 minutes)

It’s Independence Day, and U.S. Senator Charles Carroll, grand marshal of a gala parade that ends at Seattle’s Space Needle, is referred to by on-location TV news reporter Lee Carter as possibly “the ideal leader of our country. He’s so independent, some say they don’t know what party he belongs to.”

Carroll party VIPs, along with Carter (Paula Prentiss) and newspaper journalist Joe Frady (Warren Beatty), are whisked by elevator to the revolving restaurant that crowns the Space Needle, 600 feet above the ground, for a meet and greet. “Sometimes I’ve been called too independent for my own good,” laughs the Kennedy-esque Carroll (Bill Joyce) just before he’s gunned down by a red-jacketed waiter. Another server is shown quickly putting a gun into his jacket pocket, unnoticed. The assassin escapes to the structure’s roof where he wrestles briefly with Carroll’s security men before plunging to his death.

Three years later, long after a Senate committee has ruled that the killer acted alone with “no evidence of a wider conspiracy,” Carter isn’t so sure. “Somebody’s trying to kill me. I’m terrified!” she tells ex-boyfriend Frady, who isn’t buying it. It’s a coincidence, he assures her, that four of the 18 people present at the assassination have died since then. “You haven’t heard?” she says. “Two more have died.” Carter is next seen laid out on a morgue slab, as the post-mortem doctor gives his opinion, “There was enough alcohol and barbiturates in her blood stream to have killed her if she’d fallen asleep in bed, let alone at the wheel of a car.”

Frady is now convinced he’s next. “Somebody is systematically knocking off the witnesses to the Carroll assassination, and you don’t care!” he barks at his skeptical editor, Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn). To get evidence for the story that he’s determined to write about this terrifying chain of events, Frady is driven by local law enforcement to the site of the recent “accidental” drowning of one of the witnesses.

Sheriff Wicker (Kelly Thordsen) tosses a sack lunch to the journalist, poking around in a dry riverbed, just as the floodgates to the dam upstream are opened wide. Escaping a watery grave by sheer luck, Frady tracks down Senator Carroll’s former political adviser, Austin Tucker (William Daniels), who’s so frightened he insists on meeting the reporter (only after a strip-search) on his yacht, miles from the shore.

The  wall-to-wall paranoia that flows like a morphine drip from this political thriller resembles the vibe of 1976’s All The President’s Men for good reason. Alan J. Pakula directed both. Unlike the roster of well-known Nixon associates depicted in All The President’s Men, the enemy here appears as nameless businessmen, shown only in long-distance shots. The amorphous nature of this deadly conspiracy makes it appear even more menacing.

One reply on “Vintage Movies: “The Parallax View””

while the Parallax View can’t hold a candle to The Conversation, it’s distant cousin, they both share the same theme as, say, Antonioni’s Blow Up — the closer one examines something – the further the real truth gets. The Parallax View does a damn effective job of getting this theme across whilst avoiding a lot of the pitfalls of several of the similar typed films contemporary with it (Executive Action, Targets, etc). the film maintains a good amount of suspension of disbelief and moves along at a hitchcock-ian pace, complete with MacGuffins aplenty. this would make my top 100 list, just barely.

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