10 Most Shocking Jump Cuts In Film History

5. Carter's Death - The Parallax View

The Parallax View
Paramount Pictures

The Warren Beatty-starring 1974 political thriller The Parallax View follows newspaper reporter Joe Frady (Beatty) as he investigates a shady corporation which specialises in political assassinations.

An early sequence sees Frady visited by his TV reporter ex-girlfriend Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), who tearfully explains that she witnessed the assassination of a presidential candidate years prior, and with numerous other witnesses turning up dead, fears she'll be next.

Joe doesn't take her seriously, and instead comforts her with a hug, after which we immediately jump cut to Lee's corpse in the morgue, having died of an apparent drug overdose (though we as the audience know better).

Given how much the thriller genre loves to leer on every grisly detail of a character's death, this was fantastically effective in how jarringly it got to the point: Joe didn't believe her, and she ended up dead.

A more conventional film would've actually depicted Lee's demise in some form, but in leaping from life to death so abruptly, director Alan J. Pakula was able to achieve maximum unsettling paranoia.

Advertisement
In this post: 
the-ring
 
First Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.