In the early 1970s, muckraking newspaper reporter and former alcoholic Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) sees a popular senator assassinated while cover a campaign function in the restaurant atop Seattle's recently constructed Space Needle. The apparent assassin escapes the scene only to be cornered by two security men (or at least they seem to be) on the building's roof, then falls to his death. Three years later, Joe's fellow reporter and former lover Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) shows up at his place in a panic, saying that six of the witnesses from that day are dead and she suspects she's next; Joe thinks she's being paranoid until she ends up dead of what the coroner deems a drug overdose. Convinced that Lee's death was no accident, Joe dives into an off-the-books undercover operation disguised as news-gathering, and discovers a shadowy corporation whose only function, it seems, is to recruit and train assassins.

With a script by Lorenzo Semple, Jr. (TV's Batman, the 1976 King Kong) and David Giler (Alien) ada[pting Loren Singer's source novel, The Parallax View was the second in a trilogy of thrillers directed by Alan J. Pakula in the 1970s. It failed at the box office, but its reputation has only grown over time. Although its release was sandwiched between two other Pakula movies in what has been dubbed his "Paranoid Trilogy," the more critically and commercially successful Klute and All the President's Men, some consider Parallax to be the best of the three—or, at the very least, its most uncompromising, following the logic of its story into a very dark place. Composer Michael Small, who also scored the other movies in Pakula's trilogy, is ominous yet subtle. Mingling hope and despair, it gives subtle insights into Joe's personality and the glum and fearful mood in the post-1960s United States that the film itself is too withholding to spell out.

In an 2021 article in Criterion Current, movie music expert Tim Grieving called The Parallax View score "...arguably Small’s masterpiece, and perhaps Pakula’s, and it offers the most potent brew of their unique chemistry. Small’s music, written for a small ensemble and sparsely but surgically placed, complements Gordon Willis’s inky photography; it’s obscured and deceptively minimal, but there are depths in the shadows. The score forces you to lean in and pay attention, telling you in a whisper that something isn’t right. A recurring motif is two simple notes, played on a Fender Rhodes piano, descending a minor ninth interval—almost a perfect octave, but just askew."

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