The Parallax View (1974)

Directed by Alan J. Pakula. Starring Warren Beatty, Hume Cronyn, Paula Prentiss, William Daniels, Kenneth Mars, Walter McGinn, Kelly Thordsen, Jim Davis. [R]

Highly improbable conspiracy thriller floats the theory that a powerful corporation is in the business of recruiting killers for assassinations and cover-ups, operating with an almost unfathomable level of “secret society” authority. However, the film is constructed of such taut suspense and creepy insinuation that it’s very easy to just go right along with it. Beatty plays a motivated maverick reporter who stumbles upon the idea; he was in the vicinity of a political murder a few years earlier and learns that many of the witnesses to the event have since been dying off one by one. Exemplifies the narrow line between ingenuity and absurdity, and the filmmaking is no doubt effective (very disciplined by the standards of purveyors of the outlandish), but it’s a shame that so few characters are developed in a fashion where their fate seems to matter beyond the level of pieces on a chess board. Robert Towne went uncredited for his script rewrite, based on the novel by Loren Singer.

73/100