The Conversation
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| The Conversation | |
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| Directed by | Francis Ford Coppola |
| Produced by | Francis Ford Coppola |
| Written by | Francis Ford Coppola |
| Starring | Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest |
| Editing by | Richard Chew Walter Murch |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
| Release date(s) |  April 7, 1974 (NYC only) |
| Running time | 113 min. |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $1,600,000 |
| IMDb profile | |
The Conversation is an Academy Award nominated 1974 mystery thriller about audio surveillance, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Teri Garr, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford, and an uncredited appearance from Robert Duvall.
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[edit] Synopsis
Harry Caul (Hackman) is a paranoid surveillance expert running his own company. Caul is obsessed with his own privacy; his apartment is almost bare behind its triple-locked door, he uses pay phones to make calls and claims to have no home telephone, and his office is enclosed in wire mesh in a corner of a much larger warehouse. Caul is utterly professional at work, but he finds personal contact difficult. He is exquisitely uncomfortable in dense crowds and withdrawn and taciturn in more intimate situations; he is also reticent and secretive with work colleagues. He is nondescript in appearance, except for his habit of wearing a translucent plastic raincoat virtually everywhere he goes, even when it is not raining. Despite his insistence that his professional code means that he is not responsible for worrying about the actual content of the conversations he records or the uses to which his clients put his surveillance activities, he is in fact wracked by guilt over a past wiretap job that left three persons dead; his sense of guilt is sharpened by his devout Catholicism. His one hobby is playing along with his favourite jazz records on a tenor saxophone in the privacy of his apartment.
Caul has taken on the task of monitoring a couple's conversation as they walk through crowded Union Square in San Francisco. This challenging task is accomplished, but Caul feels increasingly agonized over his doubts about the actual meaning of the conversation and about what may happen to the couple once the client hears the tape. He plays the tape again and again through the movie, refining its accuracy (by catching one key — though crucially ambiguous — phrase hidden under the sound of a street musician: "He'd kill us if he got the chance") and constantly reinterpreting its meaning in the light of what he knows and what he guesses. Caul avoids handing in the tape to the aide of the man who commissioned the surveillance; he then finds himself under increasing pressure from the aide and is himself followed, tricked, and listened in on, the tape eventually stolen from him in a moment when his guard is down. Caul's appalled efforts to forestall tragedy ultimately fail — because, it turns out, the conversation doesn't mean what he thought it did, and the tragedy he anticipated isn't the one that eventually happens. In the final scene of the film, Caul discovers that his own apartment is bugged and gradually takes it to pieces in an unsuccessful effort to discover the bug, eventually destroying everything there (even, after a moment of hesitation, his plastic figurine of the Madonna) except for his beloved tenor saxophone: at the film's end he's left sitting amidst the wreck, blowing a solo.
[edit] Background
Though the script was written in the mid-1960s, the film was released shortly after the Watergate scandal broke and thus reflected contemporary issues of personal responsibility and the encroachment of technology on privacy.
Coppola has cited Blowup (Michelangelo Antonioni) as a key influence on his conceptualization of the film's themes, such as surveillance versus participation, and perception versus reality. "Francis had seen Antonioni's Blowup a year or two before, and had the idea to fuse the concept of Blowup with the world of audio surveillance." (Murch in Ondaatje, 2002, p. 152). There are also several overt borrowings from Blowup, notably the presence of mimes in both films and the central sequences involving the enhancement of a medium to reveal details previously unnoticed (photography in Blowup, audio tapes in The Conversation). Coppola has also noted the influence of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf on the figure of Harry Caul (Ondaatje, 2002, p. 152) and (in the hotel bathroom scene) Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.[citation needed]
Much of the style of the film owes a debt to Walter Murch, the supervising editor and sound designer. Murch had more or less a free hand during the editing process, since Coppola was already working on The Godfather II at the time. (Ondaatje, 2002, p. 157).
While Gene Hackman's character name Harry Caul was supposedly the result of a typo, the spelling leads to a marvelous visual pun. A caul, is a fetal membrane that protects the fetus at birth. Hackman's character is seen wearing a thin, translucent rain coat, even in the sun. Coppola often uses visual puns and in this case it supports the character interpretation of Harry Caul as a depressive paranoid man who layers his clothing superfluously in response to infantile desires and feelings of vulnerability.
[edit] Music
The Conversation features an austere piano score composed and performed by David Shire. The score was created before the film was shot.[1] On some cues, Shire took the taped sounds of the piano and distorted them in different ways to create alternative tonalities to round out the score. The music is intended to capture the isolation and paranoia of protagonist Harry Caul. The score was released on CD by Intrada Records.
[edit] Awards
In 1995, The Conversation was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It won the 1974 Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards for 1974:
- Academy Award for Best Picture (Francis Ford Coppola)
- Academy Award for Sound (Walter Murch & Art Rochester)
- Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay (Francis Ford Coppola)
[edit] Trivia
- The young boy seen exiting the confessional box in the church sequence before Harry Caul enters is Coppola's eldest son, the late Gian-Carlo Coppola, then 9 years old when The Conversation was shot in late 1972/early 1973.
[edit] The Conversation's influence
The concept of an audio technician using his expertise in the investigation of a possible crime was also explored in the 1981 film Blow Out. Like The Conversation, it was inspired by Blowup.
The 1998 film Enemy of the State also features Hackman as a security expert who, this time, goes clandestine so as not to leave any trace of his moves. Some fans have speculated that this character is, in fact, an older and wiser Harry Caul. In fact, a screen shot of Hackman photograph from The Conversation was used in Enemy of the State, precisely when the surveillance experts of Enemy of the State get the digital ID photo of Gene Hackman.[citation needed]
The TV series Moonlight, apparently lifted much of the plot and key elements for the episode Fleur de Lis, which aired November 23, 2007.
[edit] Bibliography
- Michael Ondaatje, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, London: Bloomsbury Publishing (2002)
[edit] External links
- Analysis of The Conversation
- The Conversation at the Internet Movie Database
- Alternative Film Guide review of The Conversation
- comprehensive review
[edit] Notes
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| Awards | ||
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| Preceded by The Hireling tied with Scarecrow |
Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival 1974 |
Succeeded by Chronicle of the Years of Fire (prize renamed Palme d'Or) |
