Francis Ford Coppola insists The Conversation wasn’t inspired by Watergate. The script had been around since the mid-1960s and filming concluded before the tapes broke publicly. Nonetheless, by April 1974 they were still all anyone was talking about, America was in the midst of its’ first major impeachment process in over a century, and here came a movie by one of Hollywood’s hottest young filmmakers about uncovering secrets through surveillance. Whether or not it had anything to do with the biggest political scandal of the twentieth century was ultimately irrelevant. It struck a chord at that time that it never could have had it come any earlier or later. This may be what gave it a boost in reception and acclaim, including the Palme d’Or win at Cannes and a handful of Oscar nominations that it might have won had it not been for Coppola’s other film of 1974, The Godfather Part II.
The parallels run deeper than subject matter too. According to Coppola, the very equipment portrayed in the film is the same as what the Nixon administration was using. A major culminating moment in the plot happens to occur at a hotel. And of course within a few months of the films’ release, Nixon resigned in disgrace. A lot of big happenstances that proved fortuitous for Coppola’s little project between Godfathers, a movie that might otherwise have slipped under the radar to be uncovered as a gem decades later. Not to say The Conversation isn’t a gem of course, especially now that it’s no longer quite as remembered as Coppola’s biggest movies of that era and beyond.
In fact it’s one of his most interesting films, if not as much a favourite as his greater classics. A slow-burn thriller about a private surveillance contractor who overhears a conversation he believes suggests a plot by his client to murder an innocent couple, it’s an especially intriguing and suspenseful film in the best ways of 70s cinema. It reminds me at times of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, though perhaps not as consistently chilling. And yet it plays carefully with the paranoia of being unknowingly monitored: watched or listened to. Coppola has admitted the plot comes largely borrowed from Antonioni’s Blowup, about a photographer who believes he’s captured a murder in one of his photos. The Conversation I might say compels me more though, if for no other reason than that it’s much more invested in that central mystery, and not as prone to distractions as Blowup. On the contrary it is all that Gene Hackmans’ Harry Caul is thinking about. The moral dilemma of what he’s partaking in has him incredibly shaken, a man who spies for living while being deathly afraid of being spied on.
Caul is a really great character and one of the keys to why this movie works. It’s one of Hackmans’ best performances, playing very effectively against type. I’m so used to him being an aggressive, tough, and headstrong figure either driving the action or being its’ menacing obstacle -so much of his career it seems was informed by Popeye Doyle. But here he plays a guy who is introverted, unconfident, and subtly terrified for most of his screen-time. He’s especially secretive about his work and more than a touch paranoid -using payphones over his home phone whenever he can and keeping said home sparsely furnished and abundantly locked. Even at work, he keeps to his own minuscule cell in a warehouse he shares with his fellow private surveyor and the closest thing he has to a friend, Stan, played by ever-welcome and sorely-missed 70s staple John Cazale. Cazale is great as a more blue collar variant on the extremely uptight Caul, who is both an avatar for the audiences’ suspicion and their anxiety. As we see how his world works we’re made more aware just how far surveillance can go, and understand his obsession with privacy. He knows the myriad ways someone could spy on him.
As Caul speculates on and investigates the couple he believes are in danger, he starts to ponder the ethics of his business. If he hands over the tapes, does that make him complicit in whatever might happen to the people he spied on? By listening, he has subjected himself to a deep moral crisis. By invading this couples’ privacy, he has gotten involved in their trouble. The conversation itself, repeated in bursts throughout the movie as Caul pieces it together and tries to decipher it, is rather ambiguous. Mark (Frederic Forrest) and Ann (Cindy Williams) talk in a kind of coded language that avoids directness, as though they know on some level they’re being spied on. They banter, Ann muses on the sad state of the homeless, they make plans to meet again at a hotel, and Mark utters the line “he’d kill us if he got the chance.” It is something so severe that it can’t help but freak Caul out, exacerbated by the sternness with which he is warned against withholding the tape by his clients’ brash assistant (played by a fresh off of American Graffiti Harrison Ford). He keeps his cool outwardly and among his colleagues, but his guilt is palpable. Someone is going to die because of his tape -it’s apparently happened before, and he can barely live with that knowledge unless he does something to stop it.
Coppola really understands that fear and lets his audience feel it with the supple simmer of a Hitchcock thriller. His film opens with a crane shot on Union Square that slowly pans in, isolating its’ subjects with uncomfortable precision. Their dialogue through this sequence is garbled, spotty, incomprehensible -the sounds that come through the various recording instruments set up at key vantage points around them -and it’s very eerie to listen to. You notice other people in the scene: a street performer, a businessman on lunch, unaware that they’re being picked up. And the people doing the spying would be the villains of any other movie -the ominousness and sheer omnipresence of this work suggests that perhaps they are here too. What kind of people after all would engage in this sort of thing? The other surveillance contractors who Caul meets during the film are certainly more than a little suspect character-wise. Their job is to snoop.
Caul himself is certainly strange, but we see how he becomes conscious of that -especially once the tables have been turned and he realizes just how scary the possibility of his privacy being violated is. Coppola shoots him often in isolation too, framed in empty spaces or at a distance from others, accompanied by a wonderful piano score from brother-in-law David Shire, that emphasizes his utter vulnerability. You feel that dread that he too is being watched and discreetly listened to. And it isn’t made clear that he is, but a few hints are enough to set him off, even after the whole case is resolved. That final scene of his house torn apart at just the suggestion that it might be bugged, Caul sitting there on a chair playing his saxophone in either relief or genuine madness, is both darkly funny and a tad frightening. That intense desperation coupled with the scope his knowledge of surveillance technology has driven him to -they are a formidable pair.
In among all of this, Caul is given a couple romantic entanglements, one with a committed girlfriend played by Teri Garr, and another with a femme fatale of sorts among the surveillance workers, played by Elizabeth MacRae. Neither relationship seems all that interesting to Caul though and both are rather disposable elements of the film that take away from Caul’s antisocial personality. On the other hand his devout Catholicism is a much stronger side of his personal life that answers to some degree his ability to keep doing this job without worrying about the ethics. It’s also the only thing that provokes him around others -brings out the more recognizable Hackman. But this is short-lived. Coppola includes a scene at a confessional though, “one of the earliest invasions of privacy” he says, a point lost maybe on Caul.
The ultimate resolution to the business with the tapes and Caul covertly attempting to save this couple is not all that unexpected, but plays very well. His protective barrier as it happens, is breached, and the tapes are stolen, delivered to his client (surprise Robert Duvall!) -revealing this conversation as an affair of his wife’s -and leading Caul to stake out the adjoining hotel room to the couple in an effort to spy on them further only for someone to die anyways. And it shouldn’t be undervalued how suspenseful this movie is. Coppola’s not much known for scaring his audiences (his Dracula is very good, but it’s not scary), yet that backed up toilet of blood and the bloody hand against the window are some pretty good horror images. It really is tangibly in the vein of Hitchcock, this film -and Coppola definitely did his homework.
What’s curious in the end is that Caul really had no effect on what happened with his client and the couple, despite his best efforts. How that drama ultimately unfolded had nothing to do with Caul, he merely listened in, eavesdropped on this situation. And that itself is rather unnerving. Modern notions of a surveillance state weren’t really on peoples’ minds in the 1970s as they are now, but The Conversation opened up that paranoia. As much as that still relatively recent technology could be used for good (and the movie never technically shows it being abused), there is something deeply unsettling about the idea of bugs and surveyors and the loss of privacy. The film got a boost off of those topics being timely, we were ready to distrust that technology as much as anything associated with the Nixon administration -but Coppola aimed to show how even removed from that context, it is a perturbing thought to live in a world where confidentiality is no longer certain.
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