No film better exemplifies the paranoia of ’70s American cinema—the sharp, acute anxiety that was the flip side to the aesthetic muscle-flexing of the New Hollywood—than the mantra at the middle of Francis Ford Coppola’s conspiracy classic. Coming after the dark, sumptuous classicism of The Godfather, The Conversation’s choppy, elliptical style looked almost like the work of a different filmmaker, one willing to take risks with new forms and techniques. And even though Hackman had already won an Oscar for The French Connection, his measured, recessive performance as a passive, socially distanced creep—a guy used to living his life as a fly on the wall—represented a dizzying peak of actorly craft."-Adam Nayman
Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan, John Cazale, Martin Sheen, Gene Hackman, and George C. Scott gave what can be succinctly argued as their best performance in a Francis Ford Coppola film made in the 1970's. I've mentioned before that Coppola peaked early in the '70s, but more specifically, from exactly the very beginning of to the very end of the decade he just could do no wrong. I again envy Coppola in that, after delivering the definitive American epic with The Godfather in 1972, and then as he was about to undertake the herculean task of crafting the massive The Godfather Part II in 1974, he found time to not only channel his frustrations with the ongoing Watergate scandal into a film in his spare time, but, almost effortlessly, delivered the most intimate film of his career.
Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), is a surveillance expert spying on a conversation in a San Francisco park, trying to narrow into a line of dialogue through tricky audio manipulation. Everyone says he's the best in the business, even though if you look closely at a number of scenes he's secretly not that great (his landlady easily gets through his advanced security system to deliver a birthday present into his apartment). He lives alone and his only hobby is playing his saxophone. He insists that he is not responsible for the actual content of the conversations he records, but he is nonetheless haunted over a past wiretap job he oversaw where people were murdered because of his intel. Giving the final tapes to the company that hired him, but immediately regretting it, the head of the company (Robert Duvall) tells Caul the woman in the recording is his wife, having an affair with the other man in the tapes. Caul books a hotel room, using equipment to overhear the client in a heated argument with his wife. When he goes to the balcony to watch the events through the windows out of curiosity, he sees what he believes to be the wife being murdered and hides under the bed. He later sees the wife alive and finds out the CEO has been killed in an "accident," and when he goes home, the company representative (voiced by a young and almost unbelievably sleazy Harrison Ford), calls him and tells him they'll be watching him. Caul tears up his apartment, down to the floorboards, but can't find anything.
Some past films that used contemporary historical events as an allegory or backdrop to a larger story don't stand the test of time anymore. Elia Kazan made On the Waterfront after being directly affected by the Senate Un-American Committee's communist witchhunt. The film, although having won Best Picture in 1954, does not really hold up. Not necessarily because the message is too on the nose, and the allegory too obvious (they definitely struck me as such), but because the very specific story about testifying for a union feels very stuck in a 1950's mindset. Viewers only revisit it today, and everyone freely admits so, because of Brando's "revolutionary" realistic acting style that everyone thinks is such hot shit (but I'm not going to get into that again). The Conversation, though, is very timely. I think 1970's films are so precinct now because of the distrust we have for the powers that be, especially after 9/11, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay tortures have unfolded and made us question our government all over again like after Watergate and Vietnam in 1974.
The acting is not made up of the ensemble cast of The Godfather films or Apocalypse Now (although John Cazale and Robert Duvall do show up briefly), but builds off one monolithic performance, a la Patton. Although the polar opposite of the cocksure and vainglorious George S. Patton (Harry Caul is very meek and shy), Gene Hackman gives a very hypnotic performance. Somewhat of an enigma, where we only learn about his deepest fears in a hallucinatory dream sequence, it's impossible not to empathize with his loneliness, and understand why his surveillance is like a cross he is carrying to Calvary. His loneliness is doubly sad in light of the coldness of all the characters and technology he interacts with that are quickly leaving him behind. He is a control freak, even trying to play his saxophone over a jazz recording to make it more complete like at his job. Certainly he is one of the saddest characters to come out of an era of paranoia and isolation, but it is almost a relief when, not able to find the surveillance device, he resigns himself to playing his saxophone in his trashed apartment, casting off the chains he has wrapped himself in. A huge break from the tough guys he was known for (The French Connection) and would play later (Unforgiven), this was almost the last piece in a puzzle of one of the great American screen prescences (Hackman officially retired from acting in 2003).
Outside of the acting, Coppola crafts shots through a haze, with foggy zoom-ins and dull colors. In the scene where Duvall is killed, Coppola was able to pull us along with an unbelievably taut climax in the hotel, still making me hold my breath every time waiting for the jump scare even after several viewings. In a decade that stood out for its intensity (The Exorcist, Alien, Taxi Driver, A Clockwork Orange), this bloodless scene is worthy of study in film schools in how to make the most of one setting. But the wild card is the soundtrack, the audio montages of repeated words and phrases, song lyrics, and recording blips really have a way of getting under your skin: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlwdpNw1FW8). The Conversation is definitely the least celebrated of Coppola's works, though it was still nominated for Best Picture and Best Actor (Pacino, Hackman, and Jack Nicholson all lost to Art freakin' Carney), but is arguably the most relevant of any today, even though it came out 10 years before 1984.
Rating: **** out of 4
P.S. Something I came across in researching this post:
The Conversation: $4 million worldwide box office on a $1 million budget, a solid box office hit in 1974.
Justice League: $650 million worldwide box office on a $300 million budget, a box office flop in 2017.
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