The Parallax View on Criterion Collection

"In part one of Parallax Views on The Parallax View, noted film historian Joseph McBride gives his thoughts on The Parallax View (1974) as well as to discuss the film in the context of the Kennedy assassination, the Nixon Presidency and Watergate, and the rise of New Hollywood. He also offers some personal stories about The Parallax View‘s director Alan J. Pakula, discusses the technical aspects of the film such as the lauded cinematography done by Gordon Willis, and much more." Reviewing films depicting political assassination conspiracies for The Guardian, director Alex Cox labelled The Parallax View the "best JFK conspiracy movie". Film critic Matt Zoller Seitz has called the film, "a damn near perfect movie". It has an approval rating of 89% on Rotten Tomatoes. Joseph McBride: I asked him Alan J Pakula during the making of All The President's Men if he had heard, based on information I had been given by a friend who was an RFK assassination researcher, that journalist Bob Woodward was a covert ONI or CIA agent. Pakula's actual reply to me was, "I've heard that, but if I think about it while making this movie, I'll go crazy." His comment to me on Woodward shows his savvy but the limits of how far he wanted or could go. Billy Wilder's The Front Page from 1974 can be read as a satire of the media frenzy over Woodward & Bernstein and is a strong indictment of the callousness and dishonesty of the press; Wilder had worked as reporter during his Vienna and Berlin days and saw through some of the Washington Post's fabrications. I think someone should do an honest film about Woodward & Bernstein. My friend Rod Lurie, a former film critic who is now a writer-director—I helped get him into the LA Film Critics Association after he was blackballed for having suggested a remake of All The President's Men. 

Oliver Stone's superb, underrated NIXON does deal with Watergate extensively and serves as a corrective. Most reviewers missed the subtle JFK conspiracy connections in that film. I gave it a rare five stars when I reviewed it as the first film I reviewed for Boxoffice. I dropped a note to Oliver Stone suggesting he do LBJ to complete a presidential trilogy, but to my surprise he wrote back and said LBJ never interested him. The Richard Helms scene at Langley is extended in the Director's Cut where Sam Waterston (playing Helms) leans over to sniff the Angleton orchids, then stares at Nixon with solid-black eyeballs, amid some trippy film effects that suggest Nixon has seen in those eyes an unnerving revelation about CIA power. Maybe the scene was slashed because Stone fought to keep the black eyeballs in. If there's anything missing in Nixon, it's in the treatment of Nelson Rockefeller as political wallpaper, a period character who appears at a cocktail party and is never considered again. There was an increasing number of Rockefeller-sourced appointees in Nixon's two admins; some of them worked to accelerate the Watergate furor. There was a disturbing Rockefeller influence on the Gerald Ford administration as well. 

Deep Throat in All The President's Men is a character that was suggested to Bernstein & Woodward (Bernstein received top billing on the book) by their agent, Alice Mayhew, after she read the first draft, in which no such character appears. Yes, it's a composite of all the various intelligence sources Bob Woodward had. Their identification of the the senile ex-FBI official Mark Felt as supposedly being Deep Throat was, in Watergate lingo, a "limited hangout," since it's likely he was just one of their sources. In The Parallax View, the Senator being shot on the West Coast with a pistol made me think instantly of RFK. Then that ending. Beatty coming to realize he is the patsy, trapped, killed. Like what was supposed to have happened to Lee Harvey Oswald. 

Remastered on Blu-Ray, The Parallax View has been released on Criterion Collection on February 9, 2021. Nathan Heller's essay for Criterion Collection: The mystery of a senator’s murder is of less concern to The Parallax View than the insidious corporatization of America. Murder is committed here for hire, rented out and divorced of the personality and neuroses that drove, say, many a killer from a Hitchcock film, while modernist buildings are utilized to signify alienation in the key of Antonioni and Godard. The opening image—of a totem pole that obscures the Space Needle from a certain point view—signals the film’s ongoing obsessions with erasure and co-option. Joe Frady’s trip to a small woodsy town initially feels like a warm refuge from the chilly office corridors that haunt so many Pakula films, until Parallax is revealed to be capable of influencing people even there. Tellingly, evil is revealed via a large ominous structure—a dam with an alarm that sounds like a dinosaur’s death rattle. Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), the TV news reporter covering the Space Needle event, arrives unannounced at the residence of her former boyfriend Joe Frady (Warren Beatty), an Oregon investigative journalist who was also at the event. She claims several people who witnessed the assassination have turned up dead in mysterious circumstances. And the film’s scariest sequence, scarier than A Clockwork Orange’s corresponding set piece, finds Frady watching a Parallax recruiting video, which shows how easily images of American harmony can be flipped—or seen from a different vantage point—to emphasize the decay and exploitation lingering underneath. And in this moment we’re left with a lingering ambiguity: Is the video playing up to the psychosis of potential Parallax freelancers or revealing the truth of society? 

The movie was loosely inspired by conspiracy theories around the John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations, but in this respect it adds a wholly new landscape of terror. Of the film’s nod to the first Kennedy assassination, the writer David Kurlander told me, “Had this iconic assassination taken place ten years later, in a far taller and more future-shocked, privatized world, perhaps it would have looked more like this.” Also, Beatty's admiration for RFK was the main reason that made him do the film. Nixon described Ted Kennedy as the gregarious natural politician, JFK as a quiet and private man, and RFK as having the passion and vigour of a Benedictine monk. The arrival of the seventies ushered in the high age of what’s often called neo-noir: a return to old genre forms at a moment when irresolute underbelly dramas seemed to catch the mood of the nation. But unlike full-on neo-noir projects like The Long Goodbye or Body Heat or Chinatown (whose screenwriter, Robert Towne, did uncredited work on The Parallax View). What he created instead was a noir of urban modernity—“a darkness shining in brightness,” to quote Ulysses—that was specially suited to an aborning corporate age. It was central to Pakula’s conception of The Parallax View that Frady never actually takes the corporation’s sociopath test. Instead, he gives it to a known killer, opening up a nagging uncertainty at the core of the plot. Is the test any good? Does it really sort nutters from law-abiding citizens? And which is Frady? Just as Willis shot all close-ups at the same range, we’re kept at a fixed distance from the workings of our hero’s mind—a parallax view in the sense that things may look different depending where we stand. The line between who’s clearheaded and who’s crazed, who sees whose weaknesses well enough to manipulate them, blurs. Through its parable of failure, it puts forth the possibility of institutional society done right. The movie is a plea for better power structures and a wiser choice of heroes. Its entreaty—like its nightmare—is still fresh for the United States. Source: www.criterion.com