A LIGHT RINSE WOULD SUFFICE...:

Pakula, best known for All the President's Men (1976), is no stranger to films fraught with paranoia. His breakthrough, Klute (1971), which stars Jane Fonda as a call-girl helping with a missing persons case, is part of what is considered Pakula's "paranoia trilogy," rounded out with President's Men and Parallax. Pakula isn't the flashiest director but you can see his use of the camera and setting of a scene as the direct antecedent of Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola's The Conversation (1974) feels cut from the same cloth as Parallax.

Unlike today, most of the people in The Parallax View don't believe that a shadowy organization exists that kills for money. Through a series of tense set pieces, including Joe battling for his life as a dam opens and another on an airplane with a ticking bomb in its undercarriage, we slowly learn the terrifying truth about the Parallax Corporation. Beatty is understated in his role, in full throttle now that Bonnie and Clyde (1967) minted him a movie star. His shaggy Joe Frady, dressed in a muted brown sports coat and jeans, seems aloof to all the chaos happening around him, yet he's drawn to Parallax Corporation. Does he really want to break the story or has Joe been brainwashed? Is he in over his head, crossing deep towards a point of no return?

In the movie's creepiest scene, Joe must watch the Parallax Corporation's indoctrination video, a collection of images and words that scramble the notion of self, parents, country, God, happiness and enemy. Very similar to the video Stanley Kubrick uses to eliminate Alex's violent tendencies (taking away Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, as well) in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Pakula doesn't cut to Beatty during the montage. Instead, we witness the film in full frame as if we too are being brought in. Pakula doesn't allow us to see how Joe reacts to what he is being shown. Instead, we must sit with our own feelings.

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