The Parallax View (1974)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Joseph Frady	Warren Beatty	½
Editor Edgar Rintels	Hume Cronyn
Austin Tucker	William Daniels
Lee Carter	Paula Prentiss
Agent Turner	Kenneth Mars

Review

This thematic predecessor to the Pakula team's greater success All the President's Men two years later is a bit more audacious and far-out. The script by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple is clever and has a lot to offer, but it is also a relentlessly pessimistic downward spiral that leaves the exciting ambiguity of paranoia vs. actual peril a bit too early. Still, the direction is skilful and stylish with some great visual segments (including two brilliantly staged board announcements, and the suggestive Parallax test), and – of course – the film has Warren Beatty – in a sensual, era-defining, trendsetting performance that more than anything underlined his intellectual playboy persona. Beatty even makes a bar fight seem cerebral and fashionable, and he delivers lines in a way that makes you long for the seventies. Which in retrospect is much of what this film is about.