This was directed by Alan J. Pakula and is considered part of his so-called Paranoia trilogy, the other two being Klute and All the President’s Men, both of which we have already watched. Actually the seriousness of those two films tricked me into thinking that this was a serious political thriller as well. While it does start off being very grounded in reality, it soon veers off into the fantastic and is basically an indulgence of all of the most pernicious conspiracy theories of the time.

Presidential candidate Charles Carroll is assassinated in public while visiting Seattle’s Space Needle and the man who killed him falls to his death while being pursued. A congressional committee concludes that this was the work of a lone assassin. Three years later a TV reporter who was present tells her ex-boyfriend the newspaper reporter Joe Frady that witnesses to the event are being killed off. Frady is skeptical until the woman turns up dead herself. He pursues a lead to a small town where another witness drowned while fishing. The local sheriff takes him to where the man died and then tries to kill Frady as well but drowns himself. Searching the sheriff’s house, he finds documents referring to an organization called the Parallax Corporation together with a personality assessment survey. After consulting with a psychology professor, he concludes that this organization is trying to find and recruit psychopaths to be assassins.

This film does actually start like it’s a serious political drama with an extended interview scene about the aspirations the candidate, only to slowly veer off into crazy land. I believe that this is deliberately intended to mirror a normal person’s descent into a conspiracy theory-driven alternate universe where a shadowy cabal secretly controls society and assassins are mind-controlled via subliminal videos. It feels like a strange tangent to go off of now but I suppose it made sense in the period immediately after the Kennedy assassination. The groundedness of the scenes, as Frady is no super-spy and can only improvise as best he can as he tries to uncover the mystery, helps lend credence to the scenario. It is kind of exciting to see him try to outwit a vast conspiracy on his own but it gets increasingly implausible how he even manages to survive for so long and why he isn’t alarmed enough to tell as many people as he can about what is going on. Ultimately this film is all about capturing the paranoia of such an underworld existing as it never bothers to offer any real answers as to who these people are and what they want.

The subliminal video sequence used here is quite something and the use of the survey to identify potential psychopaths is amusing. I wish they had included more examples of questions. But ultimately I feel that this film is too wedded in its era to be effective today. Its particular fears and paranoiac delusions aren’t the same ones that we are subjected to these days so this comes across as being antiquated and even somewhat comedic. That’s why I didn’t really like this at all and feel that it’s easily skippable. I do want to point out that we in the present day certainly know what to do in the event that we run across a genuine evil conspiracy: spread the news as far and as wide as possible through the Internet and let the power of crowd sourcing do all the work. Frady trying so hard to quiet gather evidence and anonymously foil the evil plans is the very last thing he should have been doing.