← All Movies
The Parallax View
Seattle television journalist Lee Carter witnesses the assassination of U.S. senator and presidential aspirant Charles Carroll atop the Space Needle during a campaign stop. The killer, disguised as a waiter, is killed during the pursuit. His presumed accomplice, also disguised as a waiter, escapes. The assassination is officially determined to have been the work of a single man acting alone. Six witnesses die over the next three years. Carter fears she will be next, and goes to ex-boyfriend Joe Frady, an investigative newspaper reporter in Oregon, for protection; he turns her away. Shortly afterwards Carter is found dead; the death is ruled to be suicide from alcohol and barbiturate overdosing.
Feeling guilty about disregarding Carter's pleas and suspicious about her death, Frady investigates the drowning death of Judge Arthur Bridges - another witness - in the nearby small town of Salmontail. Wicker, the local sheriff, takes Frady to a place below a dam where Bridges died. Wicker holds Frady at gunpoint as the floodgates open, but it is Wicker who drowns. At Wicker's home, Frady discovers documents from the Parallax Corporation, an organization recruiting "security" operatives. Frady takes a Parallax personality test document from Wicker's home to a local psychology professor, Nelson Schwartzkopf. Schwartzkopf determines the test is used to identify homicidal psychopaths and gives it to a known psychopath to learn the "correct" answers.
Frady meets with Austin Tucker, an aide to Carroll and another witness, on Tucker's yacht; Tucker has survived two murder attempts since the assassination. Tucker saw the real assassin and gives Frady an image of the assassin in disguise. A bomb goes off which kills Tucker while Frady is thrown into the water and presumed dead. Frady tells his editor, Bill Rintels, that he will use his official death and a pseudonym to infiltrate Parallax. Frady submits the personality test with the "correct" answers as suggested by Schwartzkopf's analysis to Parallax Corp. His perfect answers attract the attention of Parallax and a few days later, Frady is recruited for training by Parallax official Jack Younger.
Frady visits Parallax's Los Angeles headquarters where he is observed for reactions to montages of disturbingly edited and subliminal still photographs and images that juxtapose pro- and anti-American attitudes. Frady spots Carroll's assassin while leaving and follows the assassin, who puts a bomb aboard an airliner in checked baggage at Hollywood Burbank Airport. Frady boards the flight, mistakenly believing the assassin to be on board, and sees another U.S. senator, Gillingham, who is also considering running for president. Frady surreptitiously warns a flight attendant. The jet returns to the airport and is evacuated before it explodes.
Younger confronts Frady about the latter's alias. Frady's cover story and a second alias mollifies Younger. Later, at the newspaper office, Rintels listens to a recording of this conversation and stores it with other evidence. That evening, Rintels is killed by poisoned food delivered by the assassin, disguised as a deli delivery boy. The evidence is gone by the time Rintels' body is discovered.
Frady goes to Parallax's office in Atlanta, where he has been assigned a security position. There, he follows the assassin to a rehearsal for a political rally for another presidential aspirant, Senator George Hammond. Frady chases the assassin. Hammond is killed by an unseen sniper. Frady finds the rifle on the catwalks and then is spotted by security. Frady flees, realizing he is being framed as a scapegoat, and is killed by a silhouetted figure.
Six months later, another official investigation reports that Frady was a paranoid lone gunman who killed Hammond out of a misguided sense of patriotism.