Screenshots for a Fortnight: "THE PARALLAX VIEW" (1974) (07-20 September 2020)

 

The Parallax View (1974).  C: Gordon Willis.  D: Alan J. Pakula.

Questionnaire that opens a mysterious door to the truth in The Parallax View.

One evening in the winter of 1972-1973 I was walking up N. Hudson Avenue from Hollywood Boulevard, headed to my place at the Lido Apartments when I saw a sheet of paper with typewriting on it, lying in the dry gutter. I picked it up and looked at the front of it.  Hey, it's a Scientology questionnaire!  (The Scientology building was only a few blocks away.)  I love questionnaires, I said to myself.  I walked to the next street lamp, at the corner of Yucca Street, across the street from my apartment building, and stood underneath it to read.

I am informed and believe and thereon allege that this questionnaire originally had multiple sheets of paper and comprised a series of about 200 statements.  I had found only one sheet (2 pages) and I don't know how many statements.  I was supposed to agree or disagree with each one.  After a few seemingly innocuous statements, the questionnaire took a dark turn.  The statements became downright creepy.  Before long I realized who or what the Scientologists were looking for.  Anyone who answered these creepy statements a certain way had to be a psychopath.  I stopped reading: the portrait these statements were drawing sent a chill up my spine.  I quickly looked up and down N. Hudson and Yucca and then stared at the Lido Apartments parking lot across the street for several seconds.  I wondered if I was being watched.  I don't know why.  Maybe that statement in the questionnaire had gotten to me.  (Number 58 in the screenshot was on the Scientology questionnaire page I read.  Maybe all of them in the screenshot were.)  I folded up the paper, shoved it in my pocket, and resumed walking until I got home where I threw it away in my own trash can.  I didn't want any part of a scheme to help Scientologists recruit psychopaths.  (They were probably trying to weed out psychopaths.)  Meanwhile, I braced myself for a knock on my door that never came.

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My wife and I saw The Parallax View (1974) on the big screen in 1974.  I thought it was a masterpiece.  I've seen it several times since then on streaming video (currently free with Amazon Prime).  Today, more than 40 years since I first saw it, I have a better knowledge of film and of masterpieces.  Today, I would say The Parallax View, while not a masterpiece, is nevertheless excellent.  At imdb.com, I have rated it 10 out of 10.

It is chock full of intrigue and a fair amount of action.  It has investigative journalism, pathos, suspense, mystery, drama, humor, poignance, blood, political corruption, assassination, and conspiracy, plus Warren Beatty in his smartass prime, Paula Prentiss, and Hume Cronyn.

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Gordon Willis was one of the best cinematographers of the Modern Era.  His inspired camera shots in this film frequently carry the subtext of the story, as when the camera is zoomed out for a long shot to reveal the vast chasm between the blue-ribbon panel's conclusions (and themselves), on the one hand, and the reality we have witnessed on the other.

His credits include Klute (1971), The Godfather (1972), The Paper Chase (1973), The Parallax View (1974), The Godfather, Part II (1974), All the President's Men (1976) and a string of Woody Allen films from Annie Hall (1977) through The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985).

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On the night of June 17, 1972, a burglary occurred at the Democratic Party headquarters inside the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C.  It was a burglary we're still reeling from, whether we know it or not.  It led to a sea change in the way we view government that we're still fleshing out and examining.  That break-in, and the dogged probing by two reporters for the Washington Post, exposed to public light a criminal enterprise operating out of the basement of the White House, an enterprise run day-to-day by the two closest advisors to the President of the United States, Richard Nixon.

"Watergate," as the crime story came to be called, was a puzzle that Americans received in random pieces, one or two at a time.  The events and information the Post reported were published as soon as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein learned of them and received confirmation of the information from two additional sources.  As a result of this piecemeal uncovering of information, it was difficult, if not impossible, for Americans to fit the pieces together even after many of the pieces were in hand.  The full narrative of Watergate, with a synthesis of all the puzzle pieces, would have to await the monumental publication of Woodward's and Bernstein's All the President's Men in 1974, their blockbuster account of what they'd done and what they'd found, a veritable handbook for modern investigative journalism.

Two random, seemingly unrelated pieces of the puzzle were reported in the first few days of the story in June 1972.  First, one of the Watergate burglars had a personal check for $25,000 made out to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, which was signed by and drawn on the bank account of the midwest fundraising chairman for the Committee.  (Why would a burglar be carrying a check like that?)  And second, the burglars had expensive "bugging" equipment in their possession: they had been trying to install listening devices in the phones of the Democratic headquarters when they were caught.  Instantly, "bugging"—eavesdropping with listening devices—entered the American language and consciousness.  Whatever the burglars were up to, they were in the "bugging" business.

In more of the random bits of reporting, we learned that the White House's criminal operatives had planned to illegally "bug" many of Nixon's perceived enemies, including Democratic politicians, celebrities, news reporters, and ordinary citizens.  And if ordinary citizens were under surveillance, anyone could be "bugged."

The Francis Ford Coppola film The Conversation (1974) tapped into the angst and fear and paranoia beginning to infect the minds of everyday people.  The Conversation is a character study of a professional "surveillance technician" hired by a corporate executive to spend his workdays spying on two ordinary people.  I don't know how young people react to The Conversation today, how they feel when the movie is over.  But back then, when the movie was over and my wife and I walked to our car in the underground parking lot, I could've sworn I heard footsteps following us.

The Parallax View (1974) came on the heels of The Conversation.  Despite the milieux being in the private sector, both movies were aimed at baby boomers who were politically aware citizens,  shellshocked by (1) the combination of a string of assassinations, (2) a conviction that our government was somehow involved, (3) the Vietnam War deceptions, and (4) the Nixon White House criminal enterprise, with a growing sense of paranoia as well as a fear or resignation that the trust we had once placed in our basic institutions, and in the people who ran them, was lost forever.

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Director Alan J. Pakula's next film after The Parallax View was a painstakingly faithful adaptation of the Woodward and Bernstein book, All the President's Men (1976), the third film in what critics dubbed Pakula's "paranoia trilogy," which began with Klute (1971).

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