Warren Beatty wears an unidentified watch

Atop the Space Needle, a senator running for president is shot dead, and from there The Parallax View follows the people who saw it as they die one by one. Alan J. Pakula directed it in 1974, the middle panel of his paranoia trilogy, between Klute and All the President's Men. Warren Beatty plays Joseph Frady, a newspaper reporter who covered the killing and, once the other witnesses start turning up dead, sets out to expose the organization behind it. Beatty plays him cocky and restless, certain he can stay a step ahead of people who kill for a living. He cannot.

Frady's trail leads to the Parallax Corporation, a firm that recruits assassins and screens them with a test: a reel of captioned photographs, the words LOVE, MOTHER, COUNTRY, ENEMY flashing past, cut to read a man's mind by the way he responds. Gordon Willis shot the film in wide, underlit frames that set Frady deep inside lobbies and convention halls, a small figure the camera holds at a distance. He dresses the part of the working reporter, a denim trucker jacket over an open collar, nothing on him built to draw a look.

That distance is why the watch never resolves. A film this fixed on surveillance, on a company that profiles a man down to his reflexes, never gives a clean view of whatever sits on Frady's wrist. The close-ups hold his face, and the wider shots cut off at the waist or lose his hands in shadow. No account of the production names the watch, and the frames do not settle it. It stays unidentified.