If you ran a successful assassination bureau and hoped to expand business, where is the last place in America you would arrange a hit? The Staten Island Ferry? The set of Let’s Make a Deal? The observation deck high atop the Seattle Space Needle? All three are dumb but the dumbest of these is the Space Needle. For even if your pointblank assassin were lucky enough to reach the elevator after the act, he would certainly be nabbed on the ground. The only other way out is the roof. But without a good pair of wings, your assassin would have problems on the Needle’s slippery dome. Even G. “Crazy Gordo” Liddy wouldn’t have tried this—more than once.
Yet a Space Needle job, purposely reminiscent of the killing of Robert Kennedy, is the central event of The Parallax View. The movie is about how one reporter (Warren Beatty) tries to infiltrate and lasso the Parallax Corporation, the mysterious bureau whose agents specialize in knocking off politicians. In the opening scene, director Alan Pakula stages the fortystory murder of a charismatic California senator who seems to be campaigning for higher office. The perpetrator, disguised as a waiter at a Space Needle reception for the senator, passes a tray of cocktails to a fellow waiter-conspirator, then fatally shoots the mark. Fleeing to the roof, the killer slips and rolls off the dome to his death. From here on, as we shall demonstrate, it’s all downhill for The Parallax View.
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