The Conversation (1974)
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: PG
Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes
Stars: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall
Writer/Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Director Francis Ford Coppola has reworked his Godfather movies more times than Don Corleone went to the mattresses. And his dizzying variations on Apocalypse Now have left many film fans muttering, “The horror…the horror…”
But Coppola’s never laid a finger on The Conversation, the 1974 movie he made between his first two Godfather epics — and a new 4k restoration now being re-released to theaters to mark the film’s 50th anniversary shows why: It’s perfect the way it is.
Gene Hackman — three years removed from his Oscar-winning performance in The French Connection — stars as Harry Caul, a private investigator who specializes in high-tech audio surveillance. He’s based in San Francisco, having moved west from New York because, we soon learn, a job he did back east resulted in a bit of ugliness that haunts him to this day.
Plotwise, not a lot happens in The Conversation. We first encounter Harry and his team as they eavesdrop on a couple (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) as they stroll through San Francisco’s Union Square. The two clearly don’t want to be heard, but Harry is recording the pair’s every word through an ingenious network of parabolic microphones.
Much of the film’s early going involves Harry in his studio, tweaking the Union Square audio to achieve the cleanest possible version. He plays and rewinds the tape so much that, by the end of the movie, we’ve nearly got the whole thing memorized. Most of the recording involves unguarded lovers’ chit-chat, shaded by the likelihood that this is an illicit relationship. But one barely whispered exchange proves difficult to tweeze out. Fiddling with sound frequencies, patching in an electronic filter, Harry finally deciphers the stubborn passage.
“He’d kill us if he had the chance,” the man whispers. Harry’s blood runs cold. This could be New York all over again.
“He” is, presumably, the guy who hired Harry to follow his wife, a man known to us only as “The Director” (Coppola favorite Robert Duvall, in an uncredited role). Harry doesn’t want to turn over the tape, fearful of what mayhem may result. That is, of course, a violation of the detective’s code, and he knows it. He’s not supposed to get involved.
“I don’t know anything about human nature,” Harry barks at his assistant (John Cazale). “I don’t know anything about curiosity. That’s not part of what I do!”
So, Harry makes a recording, it goes to The Director despite his reluctance, and something bad happens. That’s pretty much the storyline of The Conversation. But Coppola and his cast and crew keep finding ways to put nerve-wracking spin on that skeleton of a story.
Hackman was already 44 when he made The Conversation; after a lifetime of memorable supporting parts, he had only recently exploded as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Of 100-some movies and TV shows, Hackman (at this writing, still walking among us in contented retirement at age 94) considers this his finest performance, and there’s no reason to argue with him. A loner who spends his off nights playing saxophone to phonograph records, Harry is, professional bravura aside, a balding bundle of insecurities. He has no real friends, alienates his colleagues, and has sabotaged his relationship with the one big-hearted woman who could ever love him (Teri Garr, fresh-faced and girlish, a TV bit player getting her first major big-screen moment). Hackman’s performance is a master class in understatement, his perpetually bowed head shielding from the world a set of ever-nervous, always-darting eyes. Harry’s stiff walk is endowed with unearned flourish by the flapping of his ridiculous nylon rain jacket.
Coppola’s movie is a small one, but barely a moment passes when we do not witness an emerging star in their pupal stage. Future Laverne & Shirley costar Williams had just gained attention in American Graffiti, produced by Coppola. Prior to this, Forrest’s biggest job had been as an extra on TV’s Dark Shadows. There’s an impossibly young Harrison Ford — that chin scar seems almost brand-new here — as The Director’s smug assistant. John Cazale, as Harry’s put-upon associate, was then known for his only previous film role, as Fredo in The Godfather. Allen Garfield, playing a sleazy East Coast private dick, was still honing the role he would play for the next four decades: the insufferable, vaguely criminal know-it-all.
Although he was nominated for a Best Director Oscar for The Conversation, Coppola did not win it. Instead, he got the Oscar for The Godfather, Part II, also released in 1974 — two Best Director nods in the same year.
Such was the magnitude with which Coppola’s star burned in the early 1970s: From 1973 to ’75, he was nominated for four Best Picture Oscars and won two of them. The Godfathers were unapologetic crowd pleasers; here, he is an auteur in the mold of Godard and Antonioni — opening with a jaw-dropping 3-minute shot, filmed through an extreme telephoto lens, following Hackman and his marks as they weave through Union Square. For many scenes, he lets the camera roll through long silences and actions so distant it’s hard to figure out what’s going on. Every shot is meticulously framed; every figure placed in a particular space. It’s as lovingly crafted a film as you will ever see, without the distractions that often accompany such precise filmmaking.
Because The Conversation is a movie about the things we hear versus the things we listen to, the film’s sound design is as critical as the crisp, claustrophobic cinematography of Bill Butler and Haskell Wexler (who contributed that remarkable opening sequence). Sound designers Walter Murch and Art Rochester — with 14 Oscar nominations between them (Murch won three) — envelop the film in ambient sound: the rumble and woeful whistle of a distant train…the whir of a tape recorder…the soft click of a key sliding into a lock. The Conversation was nominated for sound design; one of the great crimes of Oscarhood is that the award went to the clunky disaster epic Earthquake, specifically in recognition of its signature audio gimmick: Sensurround.
Made barely two years after the Watergate break-in, The Conversation carries a creeping sense of paranoia. But as they say, it’s not paranoia if people really are out to get you. Although the electronic gadgets Harry and his compatriots employ in 1974 San Francisco may seem hopelessly analog by today’s standards, The Conversation’s questions about a society where the notion of privacy is by and large a delusion resonate even stronger now. In the film’s now-classic final scene, as Harry methodically disassembles his apartment in search of a bug, we share his determination to be, at least for a moment, unobserved.
And so he sits, the walls stripped bare and the floor ripped up, playing his saxophone to an audience of one. The frame pans side to side, then back again, like a security camera scanning a parking lot.
No one is alone.
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