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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