In the early 1970s,
Francis Ford Coppola worked at such a prolific rate that he not only released The
Godfather and The Godfather: Part II within a span of two and a half
years, but also wrote and directed The Conversation in between them. Of
the four films Coppola directed in the 1970s, The Conversation somehow
falls in the shadows of the first two entries in The Godfather series as
well as his sprawling Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now. This unfortunate
circumstance results in a lack of awareness and appreciation of one of
Coppola’s strongest works. Over forty years after its release, The
Conversation endures as a minimalist masterpiece of the suspense genre,
contains an unforgettable performance from Gene Hackman, and imparts a lasting
meditation of the consequences of surveillance culture. 
Coppola wastes no time
by opening The Conversation in the middle of the film’s central focus: a
discussion between a young woman and man walking around a public square in the
middle of the day in downtown San Francisco. While these two talk Harry Caul, a
surveillance expert, and his associates work clandestinely to record the
discussion despite technical challenges presented by the outdoor setting and
the speakers’ shifting locations. After Caul and his colleagues have finished
taping he returns to his loft workspace to get down to the business of merging
the various tapes of the incomplete recording to yield a master document of the
conversation. While filling in the gaps of the conversation and deciphering the
recording Caul quiets his assistant’s growing curiosity over the conversation’s
content by declaring, “I don’t care what they’re talking about. All I want is a
nice fat recording.” As Caul begins to realize that this recording may carry
significant danger if it falls into the wrong hands, his adherence to this
discipline fades. Together Coppola and Hackman create Harry Caul who, unlike
the protagonists of kindred films like Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up
and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, is not a young, attractive, innocent
bystander. Caul looks all too much like a man who has devoted himself
single-mindedly to the task of listening to others while trying desperately not
to be noticed while he does it. Coppola and Hackman imbue a sense of irony and
humor into the character of Caul and the impotence of his attempts to control
what happens around him. In spite of Caul’s cold professionalism and
preposterous personal life he serves as a very human and sympathetic character
as the mystery of the recording consumes him. Hackman provides the film’s
complex main character but he’s not alone because The Conversation also
features an excellent supporting cast including John Cazale, Terri Garr,
Harrison Ford, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Allen Garfield, and Robert
Duvall, who supplies a particularly chilling cameo as the Director.
The Conversation debuted just months before Richard Nixon
resigned from office amid the Watergate scandal and bears some influence from
those events, but the film’s powerful depiction of the perils of surveillance,
not only for a society but also for an individual’s humanity, still functions
as a timely warning today. Through Harry Caul the audience witnesses the true
cost of this kind of surveillance, a cost which resonates deeply with both
Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance programs in 2013 as well as
the FBI’s recent legal tangle with Apple over gaining access to the content of
an iPhone. With The Conversation, Coppola spins fiction from the front
page and creates a beautiful, absorbing, and cautionary tale that speaks
volumes about where unchecked curiosity inevitably takes us.
-
John Parsell
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