Best Paranoia Thrillers of the 70s: 10 Films About Being Watched
For about ten years after Vietnam and Watergate, American film was certain that someone was listening and that nobody was coming to help. The result is the strongest run of thrillers the country ever produced, films where the hero investigates, understands, and loses anyway. Start with The Conversation for the most intimate, The Parallax View for the coldest, and All the President's Men for the one where the process actually works. Almost all of them end badly, which was the point.
The Conversation (1974)
Gene Hackman's surveillance expert records a couple in a square and cannot stop listening to it. Coppola made it between the Godfathers and it is the most personal film of the three.
The last shot, a man dismantling his own apartment looking for a bug, is the whole decade in one image.
The Parallax View (1974)
Alan J. Pakula, Warren Beatty and the bleakest ending in mainstream American cinema. A reporter investigates a political assassination and is slowly turned into its next cover story.
The recruitment montage is still one of the strangest sequences ever put in a studio film.
All the President's Men (1976)
Pakula again, and the counter argument. Two reporters do the work, make the phone calls, knock on the doors, and the system creaks and holds. It is thrilling precisely because it is procedural.
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Robert Redford goes out for lunch and comes back to find his whole office murdered. Sydney Pollack keeps it moving, and the final line is a warning that has not aged a day.
Klute (1971)
Pakula's first, and the most human. Jane Fonda won the Oscar as a woman who knows she is being watched and cannot prove it. The surveillance here is personal rather than political.
Chinatown (1974)
Polanski and Robert Towne turn a water rights investigation into the definitive story about power protecting itself. Nobody is coming. Forget it.
The Day of the Jackal (1973)
Fred Zinnemann's procedural about an assassin and the policeman tracking him, told with no interiority at all. You know the outcome from history and it is still nearly unbearable.
Marathon Man (1976)
Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier and a dental chair. The paranoia here is bodily rather than institutional, which makes it the nastiest film on this list.
The Anderson Tapes (1971)
Lumet's heist film where every agency in New York happens to be recording the crew for unrelated reasons and none of them talk to each other. The deep cut, and eerily prescient.
Blow Out (1981)
Just outside the decade and the last word on it. De Palma sends John Travolta's sound man into the same trap as Hackman's, and gives it an ending that is genuinely cruel.
- The genre's rule is that the hero solves it and loses anyway. That is the decade talking.
- Start with The Conversation, then The Parallax View, then Blow Out to see the idea completed.
- All the President's Men is the essential counterweight, where the work pays off.
- For deep cuts, watch Klute and The Anderson Tapes.
The whole idea
Watch one movie this week. Talk about it Friday.
We pick one film. You watch it alone, on your own time. Friday at 7:30pm PT you get ten minutes on Zoom with one other person who watched it too. No club, no homework, no small talk.
See this week's pick $5Common questions
- What is the best paranoid thriller of the 1970s?
- The Conversation (1974) is the finest film of the group and the most personal. The Parallax View (1974) is the purest expression of the paranoia itself.
- Why were there so many conspiracy movies in the 70s?
- Vietnam and Watergate. Institutions that Americans had trusted were shown to have lied at scale, and filmmakers had a decade of studio freedom in which to say so.
- What should I watch after The Conversation?
- Blow Out (1981), which is De Palma answering it directly, then The Parallax View for the political version and Klute for the personal one.