September 10, 2012

Day 57/60 - The Conversation (1974)


It’s always interesting revisiting a film you have really liked in the past to see if it still holds up with time. The Conversation by Francis Ford Coppola is still one of my favorite mystery thrillers. The film is very much a part of its milieu. Watergate broke in 1972 and focused the world on the technology of surveillance. Two years later Coppola’s film came out.

Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, known to all in American surveillance as the best in his field. The film begins as Harry and his team tape a conversation of a young couple in Union Square Park, San Francisco. Since the couple are continuously walking, Harry has set up three mikes, which allows him later to cross-cut and piece together the couple’s entire conversation.  “I don’t care what they talk about,” he tells his assistant. Later a woman tells him, “It’s only a trick. You’re not supposed to feel anything.”

“I don’t have any secrets,” says Harry to his girlfriend, but he immediately lies to her about his age and maintains he doesn’t have a phone (which he does). One can how paranoid Harry is when he has to unlock three locks and shut off an alarm to get into his apartment. He immediately freaks when he finds someone has left him a birthday present in spite of his security. He learns from his landlady that she also has a key, which he demands back.

We later learn that Harry once lived in New York, but in a case a colleague keeps asking  him about, he taped a private conversation between two teamsters and one of them, his wife and child were tortured and killed. “I was not responsible,” he maintains.  As the current job develops and Harry listens to more and more of the conversation, he realizes he may be setting the couple up for murder. “He would kill us if he had the chance,” says the young man in the couple.

While the film investigates the 1970s high tech world of surveillance (which looks like ancient history now) it also examines the moral dilemma of one involved in invading others’ privacy. Harry’s Roman Catholic sense of guilt prods him into an action he wants to deny. Is he morally obligated to save the two people he might have marked for death?

Coppola shows us the conversation over and over as the layers of what is being said plays out. With each layer we are drawn further and further into the plot. And at the end, when Harry’s world is no longer the world he believed it was, the pan of his apartment remains an image I still remembered and relished 38 years later.

One of the smiles for me as a viewer was seeing old faces as relative unknowns: Cindy Williams, Frederic Forest, John Cazale, Terri Garr, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall (uncredited) and Elizabeth Mac Rae.

The Conversation (1974) ***** (Netflix streaming)


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