Director/writer: Francis Ford Coppola
Photography: Bill Butler, Haskell Wexler
Music: David Shire
Editor: Richard Chew
Cast: Gene Hackman, Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall, Elizabeth MacRae
“Masterpiece” is always a loaded, fuzzy term to use. But in the case of director and writer Francis Ford Coppola it’s probably fair to say it about the four movies he released in the ‘70s, even if by reputation alone: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. It’s also fair to say he never came close again after that, though some of his pictures have their partisans: The Cotton Club, Dracula, Tetro, others. I’ve always liked One From the Heart, Peggy Sue Got Married, and the S.E. Hinton adaptations, but they’re not really within shouting distance of the big four.
The Conversation is the quietest and most compact of them and was also the least successful commercially on its release. The cast today looks absolutely star-studded, featuring the versatile Gene Hackman who is excellent as always. It’s a certain representation of prime ‘70s American cinema, shot by Bill Butler and Haskell Wexler and with a soundtrack (a good one) by David Shire. John Cazale and Allen Garfield are stellar, and the small but indelible appearances by Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, and Robert Duvall are fun and impressive too. Ford is impossibly young. Cazale, as you may have heard, died young and thus gave us only a handful of performances, but they are uniformly knockouts (both of the Godfather movies, Dog Day Afternoon, The Deer Hunter, and The Conversation). He was the Anton Yelchin of his time. Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams as anonymous surveillance targets are also impossibly young. In one way they are barely in the movie at all. In another, they are at the center of it.
“Masterpiece” is always a loaded, fuzzy term to use. But in the case of director and writer Francis Ford Coppola it’s probably fair to say it about the four movies he released in the ‘70s, even if by reputation alone: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. It’s also fair to say he never came close again after that, though some of his pictures have their partisans: The Cotton Club, Dracula, Tetro, others. I’ve always liked One From the Heart, Peggy Sue Got Married, and the S.E. Hinton adaptations, but they’re not really within shouting distance of the big four.
The Conversation is the quietest and most compact of them and was also the least successful commercially on its release. The cast today looks absolutely star-studded, featuring the versatile Gene Hackman who is excellent as always. It’s a certain representation of prime ‘70s American cinema, shot by Bill Butler and Haskell Wexler and with a soundtrack (a good one) by David Shire. John Cazale and Allen Garfield are stellar, and the small but indelible appearances by Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, and Robert Duvall are fun and impressive too. Ford is impossibly young. Cazale, as you may have heard, died young and thus gave us only a handful of performances, but they are uniformly knockouts (both of the Godfather movies, Dog Day Afternoon, The Deer Hunter, and The Conversation). He was the Anton Yelchin of his time. Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams as anonymous surveillance targets are also impossibly young. In one way they are barely in the movie at all. In another, they are at the center of it.
The story is about a surveillance expert in scenic, moody San Francisco, Harry Caul (Hackman), who is on assignment to track and record these Forrest and Williams characters. They appear to be office workers who have been acting suspiciously, perhaps conducting an unremarkable lunch hour affair. Today they are behaving evasively, walking a circle in Union Square and talking. Caul doesn’t know any more about them than what he picks up from his observations and recordings, but something doesn’t give him a good feeling about this assignment.
The most fascinating part of The Conversation is the sound design, based on the repetitions involved in sorting out and clarifying this highly ambiguous and gap-riddled recorded conversation between the couple. The recording is accomplished by a variety of microphones deployed in different ways, including carried by people who walk as close to the couple as they can on the street. The sophisticated media technology makes it a kind of missing link between Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Brian De Palma’s Blowout. All three pictures focus on mysteries revealed by surreptitious audiovisual technology—or, perhaps, no mysteries at all, but only the illusions of mysteries.
There is a disorienting effect in The Conversation, the kind of thing that happens when you repeat a word to yourself so often it starts to lose its meaning. We hear this conversation, in fragments, over and over. Certain fragments are heard more often or more closely together. Strange electronic noises continually obscure what they’re saying. Yet even when we hear what they’re saying it just sounds like ordinary everyday conversation, shaded by intimacy and ongoing stories where the characters are already known. “A lot of fun you are,” she says at one point. “You're supposed to tease me, give hints, make me guess, you know.”
The Conversation is at once quiet and venomous. The electronic distortions that mar the conversation are unsettling and alien next to the human voices, when they are captured. The conversation between the couple is banal, though vaguely sinister, if you’re inclined to see something more in it, like Caul, who can’t leave it alone. We watch him synch up his tape reels on three separate machines of the recordings from three microphones, for a more panoramic audition of the conversation, twiddling knobs to mix in the clearest sections and get as much of it as he can. Finally he settles on a key statement from the Forrest man, which is obscured by electronic noise. The whole plot will turn on this snatch of dialogue.
Hackman’s Caul reminds me in many ways, though he is also very different, of Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye—a middle-aged man, single, fastidious, paranoid, unable to connect with others, careful and methodical but given to random sloppy sentiment. Later, after Caul is unceremoniously tossed off the case by murky secret agent types—“spooks,” in the parlance—he continues the investigation on his own. This time he is warned off by a demonstration of how closely he is now being surveilled himself. As a result, in an iconic finish and probably the most famous part of the movie now, he tears apart his apartment in a fruitless effort to find the bug.
It's the world we were living in even in 1974. The Conversation undeniably offers up an early and prescient glimpse into the manias of surveillance culture, the clandestine peeping into the lives of others, how it corrupts even the incorruptible and ultimately debases everyone. It was hard in 1974 to imagine what was coming in post-9/11 2001 but Coppola gets a lot more right than you might expect with The Conversation.
The most fascinating part of The Conversation is the sound design, based on the repetitions involved in sorting out and clarifying this highly ambiguous and gap-riddled recorded conversation between the couple. The recording is accomplished by a variety of microphones deployed in different ways, including carried by people who walk as close to the couple as they can on the street. The sophisticated media technology makes it a kind of missing link between Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Brian De Palma’s Blowout. All three pictures focus on mysteries revealed by surreptitious audiovisual technology—or, perhaps, no mysteries at all, but only the illusions of mysteries.
There is a disorienting effect in The Conversation, the kind of thing that happens when you repeat a word to yourself so often it starts to lose its meaning. We hear this conversation, in fragments, over and over. Certain fragments are heard more often or more closely together. Strange electronic noises continually obscure what they’re saying. Yet even when we hear what they’re saying it just sounds like ordinary everyday conversation, shaded by intimacy and ongoing stories where the characters are already known. “A lot of fun you are,” she says at one point. “You're supposed to tease me, give hints, make me guess, you know.”
The Conversation is at once quiet and venomous. The electronic distortions that mar the conversation are unsettling and alien next to the human voices, when they are captured. The conversation between the couple is banal, though vaguely sinister, if you’re inclined to see something more in it, like Caul, who can’t leave it alone. We watch him synch up his tape reels on three separate machines of the recordings from three microphones, for a more panoramic audition of the conversation, twiddling knobs to mix in the clearest sections and get as much of it as he can. Finally he settles on a key statement from the Forrest man, which is obscured by electronic noise. The whole plot will turn on this snatch of dialogue.
Hackman’s Caul reminds me in many ways, though he is also very different, of Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye—a middle-aged man, single, fastidious, paranoid, unable to connect with others, careful and methodical but given to random sloppy sentiment. Later, after Caul is unceremoniously tossed off the case by murky secret agent types—“spooks,” in the parlance—he continues the investigation on his own. This time he is warned off by a demonstration of how closely he is now being surveilled himself. As a result, in an iconic finish and probably the most famous part of the movie now, he tears apart his apartment in a fruitless effort to find the bug.
It's the world we were living in even in 1974. The Conversation undeniably offers up an early and prescient glimpse into the manias of surveillance culture, the clandestine peeping into the lives of others, how it corrupts even the incorruptible and ultimately debases everyone. It was hard in 1974 to imagine what was coming in post-9/11 2001 but Coppola gets a lot more right than you might expect with The Conversation.
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