The Conversation

In recognition of Francis Ford Coppola winning the Academy's Irving Thalberg Award, I thought I'd take a look at some of this films I haven't seen before, or not for a while. Amazingly, I had never, until last night, seen The Conversation, which he made in between the two Godfather pictures. Along with The Godfather, Part II, it was nominated for Best Picture of 1974. I believe the only other director to helm two Best Picture nominees in a five-picture field was Steven Soderbergh in 2000.

In contrast with the sweep of the Godfather films, The Conversation has a narrower focus, and is ostensibly a character study. Gene Hackman stars as Harry Caul, a surveillance technician or, more simply put, a professional eavesdropper. He is hired to listen in on and record conversations, an insular world that has psychologically deleterious results.

We meet Hackman and his crew, which includes John Cazale, bugging a pair of young lovers (Cindy Williams and Frederick Forrest) as they wander through a crowded San Francisco public space, believing they are impervious to listening devices. But Caul manages to record them, and though he states more than once that the subject of these conversations don't interest him, he comes to believe the couple are in danger, especially when he attempts to turn the tapes into his client. He's greeted by the man's supercilious assistant (a ridiculously young Harrison Ford), and Hackman becomes increasingly suspicious.

It's a great performance by Hackman, who underplays Caul as a brooding loner. Given his occupation, he's excessively determined to keep people from getting access to him, either in his domicile or his life. He has a girlfriend, sort of (Teri Garr), but she knows nothing about him, and he never tells when he's going to come over. He spends his free time playing a saxophone along to jazz records. When he goes to a convention of surveillance technicians he meets a rival (a pungently good Allen Garfield), and they have a party at Hackman's office, but you can sense his discomfort, especially when Garfield plays a trick on him.

Coppola's direction is intense and unrelenting, and ends with a nightmarish scene in which Hackman believes he is being bugged, and ends up tearing his apartment apart. I would call it an example of paranoia, but given what we have just seen, it can't be called that, since paranoia is a delusion. This is an excellent film, and just another example of how the 1970s were the height of American filmmaking. It was also a very prescient film, given the talk of that year was the White House tapes.