The Parallax View

Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View (1974) is a renowned example of the paranoid conspiracy thriller, a genre that was a marker of the 1970s. The period was haunted by the murders of John F Kennedy (1963), Malcolm X (1965), Martin Luther King (1968), and Robert Kennedy (1968), together with the crimes of the Manson family, Altamont, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandal.

Mark Campbell's study of the film situates it within this historical moment of increasing paranoia and conspiracy, an...