The Conversation (1974)-Norbert Brown
May 5, 2008
The Conversation (1974)
By Norbert Brown
Between the first two movements of his Baroque Godfather saga, and years before the Wagnerian grandeur of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola released a small jazz invention of a movie - a quirky, quiet masterpieces that has probably landed on more critics’ “top ten movies ever” list than either of those bigger efforts. That movie is the 1974 Academy Award nominee The Conversation.
Of course, Coppola was in no position to complain when the movie was passed over for the award – he took Best Picture with The Godfather Part II that year. But it’s a bit of a shame for movie aficionados everywhere: as fine a film series as The Godfather movies are, they tend to overshadow The Conversation through this accident of timing. And though there’s no fair way to compare it to Coppola’s grander efforts (it’s apples and tow-trucks), you can certainly make a case that The Conversation is more insightful and thought provoking, more memorable and resonant than its flashier siblings.
The Conversation tells the story of Harry Caul, a surveillance expert obsessed with his own privacy. Caul has been hired to record and reconstruct the conversation of two people who have met secretly in a crowded public park. The acknowledged best in his field, Caul uses state-of-the-art equipment (for 1974) to collect their dialogue as they circle the park, and to put the pieces together. His job is to capture the conversation – not to listen to it – yet he becomes increasingly troubled by what he hears.
So many of images from this filmed have endured in my memory that I was afraid that, watching it again, I’d be disappointed. I thought I might be distracted by the dated technology, or that the tension in the story might not be as taut as I remembered. I feared that the symbolism of Harry Caul’s name might seem heavy-handed – especially as he wears a translucent raincoat throughout the movie and is often seen through obscuring windows and screens. This reinforces the meaning of “caul” as a thin, filmy membrane left over from the amniotic sac that babies are sometimes born with. A baby born with a caul over its face has been considered either psychically gifted or cursed, depending on the culture doing the interpreting. In Harry’s case, both meanings seem to apply: he is special and gifted, able to hear what other can’t, but he is utterly alone and separate from the rest of humanity.
But I’m relieved to say that everything in the movie rang true and was as good as I’d remembered, and coming back to the movie after all that time I discovered even more.
For one thing, although I had a vivid picture in my mind of Gene Hackman as Harry Caul sitting in his apartment all alone playing the saxophone, I had forgotten just how outstanding the music in this film is. David Shire – who has created music for dozens of movies and TV shows over the years – put together a jazz score for this movie that perfectly matches the action and the tension of this film. Like the surveillance technology we see in The Conversation, the music is very much of its time, and masterfully evokes the 70s. But it isn’t a comical or overwrought view of the 70s – it’s not a “how could we have worn our hair that way” vision, but rather one of people just emerging from the turbulence of the 60s, trying on a new modernity without quite knowing what it’s all going to mean. The Conversation is ultimately about living with moral uncertainty, and about the flawed approach of isolating one’s self to cope with it.
I was also reminded that this movie is full of familiar faces – actors you know well, some in roles like none you’ve ever seen before. A pre “Laverne and Shirley” Cindy Williams is featured as half of the couple Caul spies on, and the other half is Frederick Forrest. Years before Star Wars or Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford played a corporate lackey in The Conversation, and his boss is played by Robert Duvall. Teri Garr – an actress whose career has spanned from Elvis movies to “Friends” on TV, gives one of her sweetest, saddest performances in a small role in this film, and just as fine in a larger role is the late great John Cazale.
But leading the cast, in one of his many fine performances, is Hackman as Harry Caul. Hackman does so much with so little in this movie: the script is necessarily sparse, and his character is defined by the walls he builds around himself. Yet Hackman’s performance is intricate in its subtleties: he is a fundamentally honest man who lies to protect his privacy (“I don’t have a home phone,” he says several times in the movie, and when he needs to make a call he pulls a telephone from a desk drawer in his apartment.); he is a surveillance expert utterly outraged when a colleague plants a bugged pen in his pocket. Hackman plays these contradictions without wearing them on his sleeve; he discovers the internal consistency of his character and presents us with a man who is deeply flawed and has done bad things, but who we can care about and ultimately empathize with.
If you’ve never seen The Conversation, you owe it to yourself to get your hands on it. It’s part of your basic film education. If you have seen it, it’s worth another look: like seeing an old friend or visiting someplace you used to live, you’ll be reminded of what you liked, discover things you never noticed, and find that your fresh perspective makes the original experience all the richer.
Copyright C. 2008 Norbert Brown
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