BY TODD GARBARINI
I
have long considered Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation to be his
greatest film. The story of a tortured sound recordist, Harry Caul (Gene
Hackman in arguably his greatest screen performance), a man who is disturbed by
the morality and ethics of his profession. He is secretly recording private
citizens in exchange for payment from companies with a vested interest in doing
so and whose actions have resulted in several deaths. The film was a long
gestating project that came about during a 1967 discussion the director had
with fellow director Irvin Kirshner about wiretapping and privacy intrusion.
Following the instant success of the release of The Godfather in March
1972, Mr. Coppola was only given the green light to make The Conversation
for Paramount Pictures after they begged him to direct The Godfather Part II.
One month after the public announcement was made about Mr. Coppola’s mysterious
next film, the Watergate burglary took place. It then came to light that then-President
Richard Nixon had knowingly recorded conversations in the White House,
specifically the Oval Office, as well as over the telephone, of everything regarding
news coverage of the burglary! Who could the public trust? The Conversation
would go on to win the Palme d’Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival and opened
in April 1974 in New York.
Alan
J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, released in New York on Wednesday, June
19, 1974, was one of several films, like The Conversation, to be
released during the post-Watergate era that dealt with systemic national
paranoia concerning the government. In the month of June alone, moviegoers were
treated to Blake Edwards’s The Tamarind Seed, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown,
and this thriller which concerns the mysterious workings of a faceless corporate
entity known as The Parallax Corporation which appears to be behind the assassinations
of political nominees regardless of which side of the aisle they sit on. It is
1971 and Charles Carroll (William Joyce) is campaigning while at a luncheon
atop Seattle’s Space Needle. Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) is covering the event
for a television news story and her ex-boyfriend, newspaper reporter Joe Frady
(Warren Beatty), attempts to gain access to the event but is denied entry when
Carter shrugs him off. An associate of Carroll’s, Austin Tucker (William
Daniels), speaks with Carter in a short on-camera interview. Two
sinister-looking waiters (Bill McKinney and Richard Bull) serve food when
suddenly the former shoots and kills Carroll in front of shocked and horrified
guests. A stomach-churning chase ensues atop the Space Needle and the “waiterâ€
falls to his death.
Three
years later, a shaken Carter goes to Frady and unleashes a tale of paranoia,
revealing that no less than six witnesses at the luncheon have all died under
mysterious circumstances. Frady initially brushes off her concerns until Carter
is found dead less than 24 hours later. Out of guilt, he begins to investigate
the deaths and in a major scene lifted straight from the novel, he nearly dies
himself, outsmarting a sheriff who sets Frady up to be drowned at the hands of a
deluge running out from a dam (in the novel it’s a “helpful hotel managerâ€). Frady
manages to secure documents concerning the Parallax Corporation from the
sheriff’s house and tries to convince his skeptical editor, Bill Rintels (Hume
Cronyn), of the links to the deaths. Frady then turns his attention to Austin
Tucker and accompanies Tucker and his aide/lover on a yacht ride to discuss the
assassinations – until a bomb onboard kills both men and Frady narrowly escapes
by jumping overboard. It seems that wherever Frady goes, a Parallax minion is
not too far behind. This sets in motion a series of near logic-defying events
which results in an ending of
ambivalence.
To
fully appreciate this film in 2022, one needs to be aware of the climate of
fear and panic that must have pervaded the zeitgeist in the 1960s and 1970s
when seemingly no one could be trusted (John Frankenheimer’s 1962 outing The
Manchurian Candidate, based on Richard Condon’s 1959 novel, was eerily
prescient as was his 1964 classic Seven
Days in May, which centered on a coup attempt to topple the U.S. government).
After the assassinations of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm X in
February 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968, and Robert F. Kennedy
in June 1968, who really could be trusted? The film was shot in the Spring of
1973 while the country was mired in the Watergate scandal, and it points to evil
forces at work that Frady hopes to uncover. In the novel, Frady’s name is
Malcolm Graham and he works in tandem with Austin Tucker, one of the men who
perish on the boat.
The
late author Loren Adelson Singer, who passed away in 2009, had published
several novels, among them That’s the House, There (1973), Boca
Grande (1974), and Making Good (1993). His first work was 1970s The
Parallax View, published by Doubleday. It was written as an answer to his disdain
for the printing business he worked at with his father-in-law and proved to be
enough of a success to permit him to become a paid author. The inspiration for
the book came from the covert operations he assisted in while training with the
Office of Strategic Services and was penned following the high-profile
political assassinations of the 1960s. It also provided the blueprint for the
film which is the second of Mr. Pakula’s informally named “paranoia trilogy,â€
bookended by Klute (1971) and All the President’s Men (1976). All
three films were photographed by the late Gordon Willis. While the first two
were shot in anamorphic Panavision (2.35:1), the third film was shot flat
(1.85:1).
Conspiracy
thrillers of this era concerned with Everyman against the Establishment often
possessed creepy, minimalist musical scores and The Parallax View is no
exception. Michael Small provides an excellent theme on the heels of his work
for Klute prior to passing the baton to David Shire on All the
President’s Men (Mr. Shire coincidentally scored The Conversation
for his then brother-in-lawFrancis Coppola). It is reminiscent of the music he
would later write for John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man (1976), yet
another terrific film about paranoia.