The Parallax View. 1974. USA. Directed by Alan J. Pakula. Screenplay by David Giler, Lorenzo Semple Jr.. With Warren Beatty, Hume Cronyn, William Daniels, Paula Prentiss. 4K digital restoration by Paramount; courtesy Paramount. 102 min.
Few directors filmed American society’s overwhelming sense of mistrust and anxiety in more chilling ways than Alan J. Pakula in his “paranoia trilogy,” in which Gordon Willis’s cinematography surrounded audiences with a darkness redolent of the unsolvable, terrifying conspiracies seemingly awaiting them around every corner of their lives. Pakula followed up the extraordinary Klute (1970) with the more politically charged The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty as an investigative journalist who tries to make sense of the mysterious killings of witnesses to the assassination of a US senator with presidential aspirations. (The trilogy would conclude in 1976 with his epic of real-life paranoia, All the President’s Men.)