![]() In a daring but downbeat climax characteristic of Seventies cinema, the reporter spies an open door and makes a dash for it, only to be obliterated by a blinding blast of light as an assassin steps through and unleashes a hail of bullets (which are heard but not seen). Framed (quite literally) in the scene shown here, Frady, having just witnessed the convention-center killing, attempts to elude a Parallax functionary within the structure's array of catwalks. These events are artfully underscored by the typically masterful photography of Willis, who enhances the story's brooding ambience with his trademark use of inky darkness and silhouettes, as well as an unerring sense of anamorphic composition. #PARALLAX VIEW SERIES#Pakula and Willis explore this disconcerting theme in a series of spectacular setpieces: the slaying of a promising candidate (and eventually, the gunman) atop Seattle's towering Space Needle the Parallax Corporation's attempt to mold Frady into a murderous pawn with a barrage of mindbending agitprop imagery (a famous sequence that has been pilfered countless times) and a carefully staged setup in which yet another pol is gunned down as he rides into a convention center on a golf cart, which then veers off its course and cuts a symbolic swath through an array of dinner tables decked out to resemble the American flag. ![]() As Frady ruefully observes, "Every time you turned around, some nut was knockin' off one of the best men in the country." leaders such as John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Shot during the apex of the Watergate era, this existential tale ominously echoes the real-life murders of prominent U.S. The film follows a doggedly determined newspaper reporter, Joe Frady (Warren Beatty), who goes undercover, doubters be damned, to expose the insidious activities of the Parallax Corporation, a covert organization striving to engineer a seismic shift in the power structure of the United States through a series of ruthless political assassinations. Pakula and photographed with considerable panache by Gordon Willis, ASC. ![]() ![]() Few motion pictures have captured this gnawing sense of suspicion better than The Parallax View , a moody 1974 thriller directed by Alan J. While The X-Files is the current obsession of armchair conspiracy theorists everywhere, paranoia has long served as an intriguing cinematic subject. Behind the scenes of the iconic 1974 thriller, photographed by Gordon Willis, ASC. ![]()
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