With Watergate providing ammunition to feed the creative juices of directors and writers in Hollywood, Alan Pakula reached back a little further for the second part of his paranoia trilogy. It serves as a critique of the Warren Commission's findings from almost a decade earlier, a report that always seemed destined to deliver pre-determined answers, rather than the truth.

The apparent whitewash sowed the seeds for the decades of conspiracy theories around the assassination of John F Kennedy that were to follow. Pakula grows one of these into his own take on the rumours, placing Warren Beatty at the heart trying to track down the truth.

He plays investigative reporter Joseph Frady who works for a small-time newspaper. We first…

'This is an announcement, there will be no questions' is the final line of The Parallax View, and it could not be more apt in summing up a film deep rooted in post-Watergate paranoia. Alan J. Pakula delivers a fairly compact thriller with a long reach, tapping carefully into corporate conspiracy as he seeks to bring forth the growing mistrust of the age in political power, and the consequences of too many unknown figures being given too much reach into the lives of ordinary Americans. Warren Beatty's journalist everyman could well be us, caught up in a situation we don't full understand filled with an ominous sense of danger, which Pakula threads across the tapestry of his film. The result…

A 1970s political thriller that features a magnetic lead performance and sure-handed direction, Alan J. Pakula's "The Parallax View" may not be as significant as some of its genre contemporaries; but it is, nonetheless, an engrossing and well made piece of work. Shot in manner that builds distrust and slow-pulling tension, the film is visually compelling and narratively engaging.

"The Parallax View" is built around a reporter investigating a shadowy company's connection to the assassination of a Washington lawmaker. The story itself is straightforward, but Pakula delivers it in a way that shakes its audience with subtle and unsubtle violence, jolting reveals, and an ill-at-ease tone. He builds a world where no one can be trusted, and his protagonist is…

This superb conspiracy thriller from Alan J Pakula is probably the lesser of the trilogy of these he made behind Klute and All The President's Men, but it's a sign of how great they are that this excellent film trails behind them.

This one sees reporter Warren Beatty launching a personal investigation as to why numerous individuals that were present at the assassination of a prominent US senator have suddenly started turning up dead themselves, in numerous different and unusual ways. A conspiracy inevitably unfolds, as does a lack of sympathy and understanding from those he works with.

The formula is a pretty well worn one by now but I would imagine it was a lot fresher back in 1974.…

[Notes from a larger paper for students]

A film like The Parallax View is an example of a studio-financed, independent production. Its executive producer, Gabriel Katzka, ran his own company and co-produced with all of the major studios during the 1970s (as well as co-producing a kung fu film with Hong Kong’s Shaw Bros). Pakula himself began as a producer at Columbia Pictures in the 1950s, but formed his own producing-directing team with Robert Mulligan to make films like To Kill a Mockingbird (Universal, 1962) and Baby, The Rain Must Fall (Paramount, 1965). But even when he became his own director as well, Pakula never remained with a single studio. Warner Bros. produced both of Pakula’s other “paranoia films,” Klute…

THE PARALLAX VIEW, poster art, 1974
Directed by Alan Pakula

Written by David Giler, Lorenzo Semple Jr., Robert Towne (uncredited)  Based on a novel by Loren Singer

Starring: Warren Beatty, Paula Prentiss, Hume Cronyn, William Daniels

Tagline: There is no conspiracy. Just 12 people dead.

Trivia: The original script was written with a police officer as the protagonist, at Warren Beatty's insistence the character was rewritten as an investigative reporter.

Watching The Parallax View will induce paranoia.  You can have your Hunger Games dystopia and Zombie Apocalypse fantasies. Reality is more terrifying.

With Alan Pakula's expert direction, stunning cinematography from Gordon Willis, and Warren Beatty's convincing performance, The Parallax View takes you into deepest, darkest strata of the military-industrial complex.…

An RFK-esque presidential candidate is assassinated atop the Seattle Space Needle. The official version says a lone psychopath fired the shots, but did witnesses see something else up there that day? And why are more and more of them turning up dead, snubbed out by a series of improbable accidents — coincidence or something more sinister? Warren Beatty channels all his cockiness and long-haired anti-authority cachet into a compellingly self-effacing performance as Joe Frady, a small-town journalist with Pulitzer aspirations who sets out to investigate. As the apotheosis of Pakula’s ‘Paranoia trilogy’, The Parallax View merits closer examination.

The Parallax View is a political conspiracy thriller, one of the very best and one of the most persuasively fatalistic, but it…