Fifty years is a long time in politics and cinema. The year was 1974. It was marred by one of the biggest scandals in American politics – The Watergate Scandal which shook the country. People suddenly were or felt they were being watched. People looked over their shoulders to shake off that creepy feeling. The paranoia was unnerving. It wasn’t like today’s surveillance where your movements are monitored in order to sell your personal information to advertisers. It was more sinister.
This was the climate in which Francis Ford Coppola made his slow-burning psychological thriller about privacy. It was innocuously called The Conversation. Fifty years later, the film is released in a restored glorious 4K format generated from the original negative.
There aren’t any additional edits or upgrades as the film gently meanders along a gentle path with few peaks and valleys to track Harry Caul’s (Gene Hackman) emotional demise. It has the looseness of improvised theater and avoids flashy camera angles and sharp editing to highlight its emotional punch. The film does this all by itself. And that makes it more unnerving.
I have never offered a new version of The Conversation, which is a film I have always been proud of, I’ve never felt the need to improve. I am gratified to have made a film that has lived for 50 years – Francis Ford Coppola
As if Coppola hadn’t already reached the peak of Mount Cinema, this was his project in between his two Godfather epics. Admittedly, Francis wrote it before the first Godfather movie.
To summarize the plot, a lonely wiretapping expert and devout Catholic Harry Caul is hired by The Director (Robert Duvall) to record a seemingly innocuous conversation in San Francisco’s Union Square between a couple Marc (Frederic Forrest) and Ann (Cindy Williams). Upon re-hearing the tapes however, Caul believes he may be putting the couple in danger if he turns the material over to his client who may be planning to kill them. This dilemma causes Caul to grapple with his conscience. He is good at recording conversations, but not so good at keeping the tapes safe. They are eventually stolen, so he must retrieve them, but also decide whether he’s going to forward them to his client.
The idea for The Conversation was ignited by Coppola’s love of espionage movies and a magazine article about a surveillance technician. It began from this concept rather than a specific character Francis wanted to explore although the main character was clearly motivated by the technician.
Coppola believed that one of the best ways not to be successfully bugged was to have private conversations in a crowded place to potentially obscure recordings. However, there are electronic devices that can filter out unwanted conversations.
The film has an interesting perspective in that it is told through Caul’s point of view as the perpetrator, rather than Marc and Ann’s.
The Conversation unfolds as a loop repeating the same conversation over and over again. Each time it has a different impact on Harry as he realizes that the couple he’s eavesdropping on is about to face a grizzly death. It works as a puzzle to sustain its mystery and suspense.
Francis Ford Coppola cites Blowup as a seminal film that lead him to The Conversation. There is also shades of Hitchcock in his work. He also mentions his Catholic upbringing influenced Harry’s religious, guilt-ridden character. Harry isn’t a bad man. He represents the daily grind of the worker and does his job. He epitomizes the noir loner. He has little human contact and his main outlet is his saxophone. He is the seeker of truth, but also the hider of truth. He’s blanketed in secrets.
Similar to The Lives Of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film about the government’s eavesdropping on the citizens of Berlin, there is an angle of voyerism and search for identity in The Conversation. Harry both deconstructs and reconstructs himself especially when he realizes he is also being recorded by his client.
Do you ever get the feeling you’re being watched?
