Two tumultuous years later, Nixon was barreling towards his August resignation and Coppola\u2019s follow up, The Conversation<\/em>, about a paranoid freelance wiretapper named Harry Caul, was released. The subject matter might seem too convenient to be a coincidence but apparently it was \u2013 the script was written back in the mid-sixties and filming was completed several months before the most damning Watergate stories broke in the press. Perhaps it\u2019s better instead to think of it as kismet; shot down and dirty on his home turf of San Francisco before he began work on the Godfather<\/em> sequel, Coppola was picking up on something ambient in the air of that era \u2013 something both sinister and melancholy. The result would be one of his greatest and most personal works. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As played by Gene Hackman, Harry Caul is a man who strives above all to remain anonymous, both in his professional and personal life. Partly inspired by real-life surveillance technology expert Martin Kaiser, who also served as a consultant on the film, Harry has no attachments, no agendas, and no opinions. \u201cI don\u2019t care what they\u2019re talking about,\u201d he insists early on to his only colleague, Stan (John Cazale). \u201cAll I want is a nice fat recording.\u201d He\u2019s widely respected by others in the industry, but wary of sharing his knowledge. He likes to think of himself as a man of integrity, which can make him vulnerable to deception. He\u2019s also deeply religious, living a mostly monastic existence and scolding others for taking the Lord\u2019s name in vain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we meet Harry, he\u2019s in the midst of eavesdropping on a young couple (played by Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams) in Union Square. The slow zoom into the plaza that opens The Conversation<\/em> is justly famous; it\u2019s also unnerving to watch as a modern viewer, a potent reminder that all public spaces are zones of surveillance now. It\u2019s not immediately evident who we\u2019re looking for or listening to as voices and electronic glitches begin infiltrating the sound mix (which somehow did not win Walter Murch an Oscar), but eventually a mime picks Harry out of a crowd and a careful choreography begins. The parallels between the profession of director and surveillance expert \u2013 the meticulous eye for detail, the maniacal need for control of an environment, the perfectionism \u2013 surely weren\u2019t lost on Coppola. In some ways, the scene feels like a stealth love letter to the labor of cinema itself; the manpower and arrangement required to make a single surreptitious tape is similar to that needed to make a movie. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A movie, though, is eventually shared with others. Harry\u2019s tape will only be heard by his client, a man known as \u201cThe Director,\u201d whom he soon begins to suspect has malevolent intentions towards the couple. It\u2019s not long before Harry becomes dangerously entangled in their fates \u2013 his work, we learn, has inadvertently led to the deaths of people before. The more obsessed he becomes, the more isolated he grows, and the more Coppola\u2019s staging isolates him as well. Where before Harry was dwarfed by his surroundings so he seemed alone even in a roomful of people, by the end he sometimes feels like the only man left in San Francisco. In its most horrific and destabilizing moments, The Conversation<\/em> has more in common with Rosemary\u2019s Baby<\/em> than many of the 1970\u2019s political thrillers that followed it.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n With its reliance on landlines and payphones, The Conversation <\/em>might seem dated to audiences fifty years later, at least at first glance. But more often it plays out like a warning that we haven\u2019t heeded. Harry\u2019s insistence on his technology\u2019s superiority blinds him to its shortcomings, often at the expense of his humanity. The choice of last name feels significant: a caul is part of the amniotic sac that encloses a fetus in the womb. Harry is unformed, but tragically incapable of recognizing it. Not when his girlfriend knows he\u2019s coming because of the specific way he unlocks the door. Not when a competitor plants a recording device on him at a convention. And not when words are open to interpretation, even if they sound definitive. The last line of the film is delivered to Harry by a voice on the telephone: \u201cWe\u2019ll be listening to you.\u201d These days, Siri doesn\u2019t even do us the courtesy of letting us know. Tear up the floorboards and rip out the electrical wiring all you want. If the bug\u2019s gotten into your head, you can\u2019t get it out anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The Conversation” is streaming on PlutoTV<\/a> and available for digital rental or purchase<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In between the two \u201cGodfather\u201d films, Francis Ford Coppola made this down and dirty surveillance thriller. Released fifty years ago this week, it might just be his masterpiece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":636,"featured_media":23086,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1428,1399],"tags":[1429,1422],"class_list":["post-23085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-happy-birthday","category-looking-back","tag-happy-birthday","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/636"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23085"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23088,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23085\/revisions\/23088"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/conversation2-1024x576.jpeg\")
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