Stream On! The walls have ears in ‘The Conversation’
Gene Hackman plays a paranoid security consultant mixed up in a deadly crime.
Gene Hackman, who quietly became one of the world’s greatest actors, died last week at 95, after a twenty-year retirement. He once said, “I was trained to be an actor, not a star. I was trained to play roles, not to deal with fame and agents and lawyers and the press,” and he has been in some very notable films indeed, including The Conversation, a suspenseful yarn from Francis Ford Coppola (‘The Godfather’ films).
/Streaming /Amazon /🍅93%🍿89% /Trailer /1974 /PG
“I'm not afraid of death.... I am afraid of murder.” (Harry Caul)
Harry Caul (Hackman) is a private espionage and security consultant in San Francisco. He’s a legend to his peers, but his life beyond his work is spent pretty much sitting in his apartment and playing saxophone along to jazz records. And he’s a devout Catholic. In the role, Gene Hackman is closed in, paranoid: he knows that God is spying on him—all the time. (So is the audience.)
Harry and his team are hired by a client, “the Director” (Robert Duvall, The Godfather, Open Range), to eavesdrop on a couple who are now walking through Union Square. Screening out the background noise, Caul filters and merges the tapes to create a clear recording, but the clear words have an ambiguous meaning. (Caul is haunted by guilt from a past successful job that nevertheless resulted in three deaths.)
Meanwhile, the intensely private Caul attends a security hardware company convention that intensifies his paranoia. An east coast security consultant praises Harry to the skies and gives him a gift pen, slipping it into Harry’s pocket. Hackman perfectly demonstrates Harry’s paranoia by dropping his head and staring at the pen for several moments. And he’s right—the consultant uses the pen to play a trick on Harry.
“I don’t care what they’re talking about—all I want is a nice fat recording.” (Harry Caul)
Back at work, the conversation that Caul records for the Director haunts Caul, and is a repeating feature of the sound design. The targets, a man and a woman, are walking and talking in a crowded park to (unsuccessfully) foil eavesdroppers. She says, emotionally, looking at a homeless man, “Every time I see one of those old guys, I always think the same thing. I always think that he was once somebody’s baby boy. Really, I do. I think he was once somebody’s baby boy, and he had a mother and a father who loved him, and now there he is, half dead on a park bench, and where are his mother or his father, all his uncles now?”
After a silence the other says, obviously not about the homeless man: “He’d kill us if he had the chance.”
The original cinematographer of The Conversation was Haskell Wexler. Differences with Coppola led to Wexler's being replaced with Bill Butler, whom Coppola had worked with on The Godfather, even though its static, stately cinematography is completely different than that of The Conversation, which looks like a secret job.
A few sources list Antonioni’s Blowup, about a crime apparently revealed in a photo, as an inspiration for The Conversation; it also reminded me of Sidney Lumet’s The Anderson Tapes, which is “narrated” with covert third-party recordings of the characters.
The Conversation was filmed by Coppola between The Godfather and Godfather Part II; it was beat out by his own Godfather Part II for the “Best Picture” Oscar, but it garnered a page-full of other nominations and awards, including winning “Best Picture” at Cannes. The critics’ consensus at Rotten Tomatoes says, “This tense, paranoid thriller presents Francis Ford Coppola at his finest—and makes some remarkably advanced arguments about technology's role in society that still resonate today.”
Sources include Wikipedia (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License);
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