The Parallax View (1974)
Another Alan Pakula film that promises a lot and delivers at least half of that--half of a lot being not bad. Warren Beatty is a vaguely convincing renegade journalist in Seattle, on the trail of a company (Parallax) that trains and uses its employees to committee political crimes. You get this hint pretty soon into the film, and it develops step by step until Beatty is in the middle of it all. It's a thriller, half espionage, half crime (the idea puts it somewhere between, and so does the filming).
There are conventions here that are a bit usual, and maybe rightly so, like the hardboiled but eventually supportive editor, or the cops you can't trust, or of course the women at the beginning who want our leading man, one way or the other. This doesn't become a central thread, however (as it does say in the formative 1971 "Klute" or in "Three Days of the Condor" the next year). The development of the leading man who has to go loner against something bigger than himself, is a usable scenario (maybe seen earliest in the New Hollywood era in "Point Blank" in 1967), but it isn't developed with as much savvy as you need to give it its aura and mystery. The photographer here, interestingly, is the great Gordon Willis, who seems to dominate increasingly as the film goes on, until the brilliant scenes on the plane, and the final broad scenes in a convention hall.
This could have been as intensely action-adventure as the "French Connection" or (much later) the Bourne films. Or it could have developed the psychology of Beatty's journalist with greater subtlety. The plot is in a way an assemblage of separate scenes--the fabulous opening sequence, the awkward (and absurd) fistfight in the mountain bar, the drowning and near drowning scene (with a complete indifference to the warning siren), and so on. It sounds exciting, it should be both chilling and scary.
But between Beatty, who lacks some edge he needs, and Pakula, who thinks too much about effect and sensation, it mostly works but misses something great. And it's worth saying, because it has the elements there for something great. Which makes it worth watching, no doubt at all, and clearly the ending is ambiguous in an attempt to be profound. I actually get the sense it resorts to this final strange scene as a last resort, but it does work, the way people seem to know the danger is gone, standing as a group, even though there is no reason for them to know. It isn't feasible, for sure, but it's eerie enough to work.
Another Alan Pakula film that promises a lot and delivers at least half of that--half of a lot being not bad. Warren Beatty is a vaguely convincing renegade journalist in Seattle, on the trail of a company (Parallax) that trains and uses its employees to committee political crimes. You get this hint pretty soon into the film, and it develops step by step until Beatty is in the middle of it all. It's a thriller, half espionage, half crime (the idea puts it somewhere between, and so does the filming).
There are conventions here that are a bit usual, and maybe rightly so, like the hardboiled but eventually supportive editor, or the cops you can't trust, or of course the women at the beginning who want our leading man, one way or the other. This doesn't become a central thread, however (as it does say in the formative 1971 "Klute" or in "Three Days of the Condor" the next year). The development of the leading man who has to go loner against something bigger than himself, is a usable scenario (maybe seen earliest in the New Hollywood era in "Point Blank" in 1967), but it isn't developed with as much savvy as you need to give it its aura and mystery. The photographer here, interestingly, is the great Gordon Willis, who seems to dominate increasingly as the film goes on, until the brilliant scenes on the plane, and the final broad scenes in a convention hall.
This could have been as intensely action-adventure as the "French Connection" or (much later) the Bourne films. Or it could have developed the psychology of Beatty's journalist with greater subtlety. The plot is in a way an assemblage of separate scenes--the fabulous opening sequence, the awkward (and absurd) fistfight in the mountain bar, the drowning and near drowning scene (with a complete indifference to the warning siren), and so on. It sounds exciting, it should be both chilling and scary.
But between Beatty, who lacks some edge he needs, and Pakula, who thinks too much about effect and sensation, it mostly works but misses something great. And it's worth saying, because it has the elements there for something great. Which makes it worth watching, no doubt at all, and clearly the ending is ambiguous in an attempt to be profound. I actually get the sense it resorts to this final strange scene as a last resort, but it does work, the way people seem to know the danger is gone, standing as a group, even though there is no reason for them to know. It isn't feasible, for sure, but it's eerie enough to work.