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The Conversation is a 1974 mystery and thriller written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Robert Duvall (uncredited), Teri Garr, Cindy Williams, and Harrison Ford.
Plot
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 payphones 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 He is exquisitely uncomfortable in closely-packed crowds and withdrawn and taciturn in more intimate situations; he is also reticent and secretive with work colleagues.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 use to which his surveillance activities are put by his clients, he is in fact wracked by guilt over a past wiretap job that left three people 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 a crowded public square. The 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 ultimately 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, ultimately 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.
A similar theme — securing one's life from surveillance — occurs in a later film in which Hackman stars, Enemy of the State.
Though the script was written in the mid-1960s, the film was released shortly after the Watergate scandal broke, and deals with contemporary issues of personal responsibility and the encroachment of technology on privacy.
Coppola has cited Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up as a key influence on his conceptualization of the film's themes, such as surveillance versus participation, and perception versus reality. (There are also several overt borrowings, notably the presence of mimes in both films, and the central blow-up/tape-manipulation sequences.) He has also noted the influence of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf on the figure of Harry Caul, and (in a scene of lurking horror in a hotel bathroom) Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
Much of the style of the film owes a large debt to Walter Murch, who was the 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.
Music
The Conversation features an austere, catchy piano score composed and performed by David Shire. The score was created before the film was shot.discussion of soundtrack 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.
Awards
The film is consistently listed on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. It won the 1974 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards for the year of 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)
External links
Notes
1974 films | Best Picture Academy Award nominees | Palme d'Or winners | United States National Film Registry | Neo-noir | Films directed by Francis Ford Coppola
"The Conversation"