A shocking political assassination on top of the Seattle Space Needle kicks off The Parallax View, and Alan J. Pakula’s frenzied conspiracy theory classic only gets wilder from there. A government enquiry finds the crime was a lone gunman acting on a “misguided sense of patriotism and a psychotic desire for public recognition”, but television reporter Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) and newspaperman Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) were witnesses to something very different. As more and more people who were present at the assassination turn up conveniently dead, the reporters must discover the motives of the mysterious Parallax Organisation before it's too late.

Featuring perhaps cinema's earliest occurrence of The Big Conspiracy Board,The Parallax View is a leaded gasoline, denim-jacketed nightmare. The 1970s in America were strange days indeed, reeling from the turbulent 60s, the assassinations of RFK, Martin Luther King, JFK and Malcolm X, the Watergate scandal and a growing sense of distrust in authority. The Warren Commission investigation (in all but name) here has taken on a form more like a private sector megacorp than a shadowy government cabal, presciently anticipating a vested financial interest in re-writing America's past in glowingly patriotic propagandist terms.