The Parallax View was a messy movie to film, due partly to distracting times—it was in production during the Senate Watergate hearings—and partly to changing ideas about the frame in which its story should be told. In an early script, Frady was a police officer. He was transformed into a journalist during production, in the midst of a writers’ strike, which meant that Pakula and Beatty spent time each day reworking the script and the story on the fly. (Possibly, this contributed to the relay effect.) The present-day writer and producer Jon Boorstin, who was then on set assisting Pakula, has suggested that the flux influenced how Willis approached the film. “Since they didn’t have a script yet, the picture he was shooting, he knew, would be cuisinarted into a whole new story,” Boorstin wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books after Willis died in 2014. “So that was how he held it all together. He photographed his close-up shots from exactly the same distance, scene after scene in the picture, and used exactly the same focal-length lens. That way, Pakula could jump from scene to scene by going from one close-up to another, and the picture would still feel solidly constructed.” Pakula’s visual ideal, Boorstin reports, had been “a comic-book look.” In other words: lines, angles, frames.

The Parallax View has a very wide aspect ratio, 2.39:1, a striplike image box more associated with golden-age special formats, such as CinemaScope and Super Panavision 70, than with the anxious, personal films of the seventies. What’s striking, though, is how Pakula and Willis are forever subdividing this box: with walls, with telephone poles, with sailboat masts, and—in the movie’s droll send-up of a rail-caper sequence—with the columns of a kiddie train station. In part, I think, this boxes-within-boxes effect is meant to remind us of the framing on the Space Needle’s windows: a nightmare image overlaying the film. But subdividing the screen also allows special staging effects, which Pakula embraced. When Frady breaks into a sheriff’s home, only to be surprised there by the sheriff’s deputy, Pakula uses a stone wall to place the two men in separate boxes, building tension through their contrapuntal movement. In the final minutes of the film, as Frady sneaks along a dark catwalk inside the Los Angeles Convention Center, set off against the banquet floor below, the crucial action doesn’t take place in the center of the shot, as we expect, but in its frame. The result is a special, pointedly post-Hitchcockian kind of creepiness: not the glowing glass of poisoned milk or the crop duster slowly approaching but the actor—the star—crawling with insect-like unpredictability around the edge of the film.

Catwalks, Space Needles, escalators, convention centers: Pakula’s fixation on the structures of corporate-era modernity gives his images their visual flavor, but it also reflects a conceptual focus in his work during this time. The seventies had ushered in a new age of branded skyscrapers. In San Francisco, the construction of the Transamerica Pyramid (completed in 1972) was attended by impassioned protests over displacement, public-land grabs, and the “Manhattanization” of the city’s skyline. In New York, similar anxieties attended the rise of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (completed in 1973), which the New Yorker’s longtime architecture critic Lewis Mumford called “purposeless giantism and technological exhibitionism.” Sleek towers always loom in the backdrop of Pakula’s films from this period, generally in contrast to a more familiar world.

In The Parallax View, consider the shaggy, woody browns of Frady’s demesne in comparison with the crisp modernity of the Parallax sphere. (The Los Angeles building in which Pakula sited the corporation’s headquarters was actually the newly built CNA tower, named for one of the country’s largest conglomerates—the first skyscraper in America to have an allover mirror-glass facade.) The movie was loosely inspired by conspiracy theories around the John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations, but in this respect it adds a wholly new landscape of terror. Of the film’s nod to the first Kennedy assassination, the writer David Kurlander told me, “Had this iconic assassination taken place ten years later, in a far taller and more future-shocked, privatized world, perhaps it would have looked more like this.” The office-tower interior, for Pakula, is what headlights in the California rain were for filmmakers of classic noir: a zone of uncanniness and vulnerability where dark forces thrive.

“What Pakula created was a noir of urban modernity that was specially suited to an aborning corporate age.”

I mention noir because I think it’s useful to understand The Parallax View in the context of a movement building elsewhere in Hollywood at the time. The arrival of the seventies ushered in the high age of what’s often called neonoir: a return to old genre forms at a moment when irresolute underbelly dramas seemed to catch the mood of the nation. But unlike full-on neonoir projects like The Long Goodbye or Body Heat or Chinatown (whose screenwriter, Robert Towne, did uncredited work on The Parallax View), Pakula’s movies don’t take much from the classics in the way of character or story structure (no femmes fatales or midnight car rides here). What he created instead was a noir of urban modernity—“a darkness shining in brightness,” to quote Ulysses again—that was specially suited to an aborning corporate age.

Today, that looks like prescience. At the time, it was a dizzy vantage. Paranoia is a slightly misleading term to apply to Pakula’s films of this period, because paranoia is a victim state that overshadows normal life (a mood that we associate with those earlier, Hitchcockian conspiracy films, in which someone is plucked from daily experience and thrown into the middle of a scheme). In Pakula’s films, people seek out conspiracy; like Frady, a reporter prowling for a scoop, they’re always looking for the darkness in the bright. This active suspicion is distinctly postsixties, both because it values the instinct of the individual over the system, man, and because—befitting a moment after the Summer of Love had ceded to the summer of the Manson murders—it allows that every good path will eventually turn bad.

It was central to Pakula’s conception of The Parallax View that Frady never actually takes the corporation’s sociopath test. Instead, he gives it to a known killer, opening up a nagging uncertainty at the core of the plot. Is the test any good? Does it really sort nutters from law-abiding citizens? And which is Frady? Just as Willis shot all close-ups at the same range, we’re kept at a fixed distance from the workings of our hero’s mind—a parallax view in the sense that things may look different depending where we stand. The line between who’s clearheaded and who’s crazed, who sees whose weaknesses well enough to manipulate them, blurs. What does Frady feel when, in an eerie scene, he’s made to watch the Parallax Corporation’s indoctrination documentary—and is it different from what someone else would feel? It is not incidental that Pakula forces us, his audience, to watch the entire documentary also, at full frame.

This is a movie much more interesting than the individual-against-the-system thriller it appears to be. It offers a critique of that heroic certainty. It suggests that the system is a menace, yes—but also that there’s something futilely out of control, something entropic, in people who feel driven to take solutions into their own hands. Are they our saviors? Can we rely on them in the end? A vine of distrust climbs up both sides of the film’s dividing wall. And if it was unsettling to suggest, in 1974, that the foulness of foul societies infects not only evil actors but also seemingly good ones, it is even more unsettling to do so today.

Still, I understand The Parallax View as being carried by hope. There is nothing truly nihilistic in its outlook. Through its parable of failure, it puts forth the possibility of institutional society done right. The movie is a plea for better power structures and a wiser choice of heroes. Its entreaty—like its nightmare—is still fresh for the United States.