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The Conversation
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Wikipedia article
'The Conversation' is a 1974 American mystery thriller film written, produced, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr, and Robert Duvall. The film revolves around a surveillance expert and the moral dilemma he faces when his recordings reveal a potential murder. Coppola cited the Michelangelo Antonioni thriller 'Blowup' (1966) as a key influence. Since the film was released to theaters just a few months before Richard Nixon resigned as president, though, he felt that audiences interpreted the film as being a reaction to the Watergate scandal.
'The Conversation' premiered at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d'Or, the festival's highest prize, and was theatrically released on April 7, 1974 by Paramount Pictures to critical acclaim but box office disappointment, grossing $4.2 million on a $1.6 million budget. The film received three nominations at the 47th Academy Awards; Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Sound.
In 1995, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Plot
Surveillance expert Harry Caul, who runs his own company in San Francisco, is obsessed with his own privacy. His apartment is almost bare behind its triple-locked door and burglar alarm, he uses pay phones to make calls, claims to have no home telephone, and his office is enclosed in a chain-link cage in a corner of a much larger warehouse. He has no friends, his girlfriend Amy knows little about him, and his sole hobby is playing along to jazz records on a tenor saxophone alone in his apartment.
Caul insists that he is not responsible for the actual content of the conversations he records or the use to which his clients put his surveillance activities. He is racked by guilt, though, over a past wiretap job after which three people were murdered. This sense of guilt is amplified by his devout Catholicism.
Caul, his colleague Stan, and some freelance associates have been tasked with bugging the conversation of a couple as they walk through crowded Union Square in San Francisco, surrounded by a cacophony of background noise. Amid the small talk, the couple discusses fears that they are being watched, and mention a discreet meeting at a hotel room in a few days. The challenging task of recording this conversation is accomplished by a number of surveillance operatives located in different positions around the square. After Caul has merged and filtered the different tapes, the final result is a sound recording in which the words themselves are clear, but the meaning is ambiguous.
When the client is not in his office, Caul refuses to leave the tape with his client's assistant, Martin Stett. The assistant warns him against getting involved, telling him that the tapes are "dangerous". Feeling increasingly uneasy about what may happen to the couple once the client hears the tape, Caul repeatedly plays the tape, gradually refining the recording. Using a filter, he reveals a key phrase hidden under the sound of a street musician: "He'd 'kill' us if he got the chance."
Caul avoids handing in the tape to the aide of the man who commissioned the surveillance. Afterward, he finds himself increasingly pressured by the client's aide and is himself followed, tricked, and bugged. The tape of the conversation is eventually stolen from him while his guard is down. He goes to the client ("the Director") to find he has received the tapes, and learns that the woman in the recording is the client's wife, apparently having an affair with the other man in the tapes.
Caul books a hotel room next to one mentioned in the recording of the conversation. He uses equipment to overhear the client in a heated argument with his wife. When he goes to the balcony to curiously watch the events through the windows, he sees what he believes to be the wife being murdered, and retreats in shock. He later breaks into the hotel room to find no sign of a murder scene, save for the toilet which overflows with bloody toilet paper.
Caul later attempts to confront the client at his office in the Embarcadero Center, but the client is absent. While departing, Caul notices the wife, alive and unharmed, in a limousine. He learns that his client was killed in an "accident" and discovers the truth; the couple he heard in Union Square was talking about killing the woman's husband, and the murder Caul witnessed was actually that of his client and not the wife. The man in the recording actually said, "He'd kill 'us' if he got the chance."
Caul gets a phone call from Stett, who plays a recording of Caul's saxophone playing from seconds earlier and tells him not to look any further into the matter, adding, "We'll be listening to you." Caul frantically searches for a listening device, tearing up his apartment, to no avail. He sits amid the wreckage playing his saxophone, the only thing in his apartment left intact.
Cast
Production
Coppola has cited Michelangelo Antonioni's 'Blowup' (1966) as a key influence on his conceptualization of the film's themes, such as surveillance versus participation, and perception versus reality. "Francis had seen [it] a year or two before, and had the idea to fuse the concept of 'Blowup' with the world of audio surveillance."
On the DVD commentary, Coppola says he was shocked to learn that the film used the same surveillance and wire-tapping equipment that members of the Nixon Administration used to spy on political opponents prior to the Watergate scandal. Coppola has said this is the reason the film gained part of the recognition it has received, but that this is entirely coincidental. Not only was the script for 'The Conversation' completed in the mid-1960s (before the Nixon Administration came to power), but the spying equipment used in the film also was discovered through research and the use of technical advisers, and not, as many believed, by revelatory newspaper stories about the Watergate break-in. Coppola also noted that filming of 'The Conversation' had been completed several months before the most revelatory Watergate stories broke in the press. Since the film was released to theaters just a few months before Richard Nixon resigned as president, Coppola felt that audiences interpreted the film to be a reaction to both the Watergate scandal and its fall-out.
The original cinematographer of 'The Conversation' was Haskell Wexler. Severe creative and personal differences with Coppola led to Wexler's firing shortly after production began, and Coppola replaced him with Bill Butler. Wexler's footage on 'The Conversation' was completely reshot, except for the technically complex surveillance scene in Union Square. This was the first of two Oscar-nominated films where Wexler would be fired and replaced by Butler, the second being 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' (1975), where Wexler had similar problems with Milo Forman.
Walter Murch served as the supervising editor and sound designer. Murch had more or less a free hand during the editing process, since Coppola was already working on 'The Godfather Part II' at the time. Coppola noted in the DVD commentary that Hackman had a very difficult time adapting to the Harry Caul character because he was so much unlike himself. Coppola says that Hackman was at the time an outgoing and approachable person who preferred casual clothes, whereas Caul was meant to be a socially awkward loner who wore a rain coat and out-of-style glasses. Coppola said that Hackman's efforts to tap into the character made the actor moody and irritable on set, but otherwise Coppola got along well with his leading man. Coppola also notes on the commentary that Hackman considers this one of his favorite performances.
'The Conversation' features a piano score composed and performed by David Shire. The score was created before the film was shot. On some cues, Shire used 'musique concrte' techniques, taking the taped sounds of the piano and distorting them in different ways to create alternative tonalities to round out the score. The score was released on CD by Intrada Records in 2001.Intrada Special Collection Volume 2
Inspiration
The character of Harry Caul was inspired by surveillance technology expert Martin Kaiser, who also served as a technical consultant on the film. According to Kaiser, the final scene of the filmin which Caul is convinced he is being eavesdropped in his apartment, cannot find the listening device, and consoles himself by playing his saxophonewas inspired by the passive covert listening devices created by Lon Theremin, such as the Great Seal bug. "He couldn't find out where [the bug] was because it was the instrument itself."Coppola also based Caul on the protagonist of Herman Hesse's 1927 novel 'Steppenwolf', Harry Haller, a "total cipher" who lives alone in a boarding house. Coppola also made Caul religious, originally intending the character to have a confession scene; Coppola has said that the practice of confession is "one of the earliest forms of the invasion of privacy--earliest forms of surveillance."
Reception
Box office
The film had a $1,600,000 budget and grossed $4,420,000 domestically.Critical response
According to the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 96% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 57 reviews, with an average rating of 8.7/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "This tense, paranoid thriller presents Francis Ford Coppola at his finestand makes some remarkably advanced arguments about technology's role in society that still resonate today." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 85 out of 100 based on 15 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".Roger Ebert's contemporary review gave 'The Conversation' four out of four stars, and described Hackman's portrayal of Caul as "one of the most affecting and tragic characters in the movies".Ebert, Roger (1974). "[http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19740101/REVIEWS/401010311/1023 The Conversation]". January 1, 1974. Retrieved 28 November 2012. In 2001, Ebert added 'The Conversation' to his "Great Movies" list, describing Hackman's performance as a "career peak" and writing that the film "comes from another time and place than today's thrillers, which are so often simple-minded".Ebert, Roger (2001). "[http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20010204/REVIEWS08/102040301/1023 The Conversation]". February 4, 2001. Retrieved 28 November 2012.
In 1995, 'The Conversation' was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Gene Hackman has named the film his favorite of all those he has made. His performance in the lead role was listed as the 37th greatest in history by Premiere Magazine in 2006. In 2012, the Motion Picture Editors Guild listed the film as the 11th-best edited film of all time based on a survey of its membership.
Accolades
'The Conversation' won the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film, the highest honor at the1974 Cannes Film Festival. The film was also nominated for three Academy Awards for 1974, but the Academy preferred Coppola's 'The Godfather Part II', unlike critics in the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics.
Influence and legacy
According to film critic Kim Newman, the 1998 film 'Enemy of the State', which also stars Gene Hackman as co-protagonist, could be construed as a "continuation of 'The Conversation'". The photograph of Lyle in his NSA file is actually a photograph of Caul. Also, Hackman's character in 'Enemy of the State' closely resembles Caul: he dons the same translucent raincoat, and his workshop is nearly identical to Caul's. 'Enemy of the State' also includes a scene which is very similar to 'The Conversation's opening surveillance scene in San Francisco's Union Square.
The film ranked 33rd on the BBC's 2015 list of "100 Greatest American Films", voted by film critics from around the world. In 2016, 'The Hollywood Reporter' ranked the film 8th among 69 counted winners of the 'Palme d'Or' to date, concluding "Made in a flash between the first two Godfather movies, Coppolas existential spy thriller has since become a pinnacle of the genre."
A television pilot starring Kyle MacLachlan as Harry Caul was produced for NBC. It was not picked up for a full series.Schneider, Michael. (2008-08-06). [https://variety.com/2008/scene/markets-festivals/amc-krantz-talking-conversation-1117990199/ AMC, Krantz talking Conversation]. 'Variety'. [https://web.archive.org/web/20151123212248/https://variety.com/2008/scene/markets-festivals/amc-krantz-talking-conversation-1117990199/ Archived on] 2015-11-23.
See also
* List of American films of 1974
* List of films featuring surveillance
*'Blow Out', a 1981 Brian De Palma film that is similar in content
References
Bibliography
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