The Conversation, 1974. Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Starring Gene Hackman, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall, Cindy Williams, Michael Higgins, and some of the finest character actors of the 70s: John Cazale, Frederick Forrest, Teri Garr, and Allen Garfield.
Shows Wednesday night, July 26, at 9:00pm and Sunday, August 6 at 5:00pm on Turner Classic Movies.
I was all of six years old when Richard Milhouse Nixon resigned. Too young to understand the full implications, too young not to keep pestering my mother and grandparents as they gaped at the television set, too young to do anything but make fun of the sweaty, pasty-faced fellow on the tv screen. This was Los Angeles in 1974, to me a world of Disneyland and Dodger Stadium; to my mom, no doubt it was a place where the sun was burning hot on a world that seemed to come unraveled.
So, too, was I unable to appreciate the wealth of great films that year: 1974 was a feast of paranoid filmmaking, from Chinatown to The Godfather, Part II to The Parallax View to Francis Ford Coppola’s underrated The Conversation. Granted, the innocuous Sting made more than the lot put together, but it was a great year to exercise your frustrations onscreen.
Sometimes it’s hard to for me to imagine how pervasive the Watergate scandal was back then. Nixon resigned, you may or may not recall because he was certain to be impeached, and that impeachment would likely result in a verdict of removal. Today, when we go into the details of Watergate to those who are too young to have experienced or remembered, there is often a look of bafflement: that is what got Nixon kicked out? Knowingly supporting the Watergate break-in? Add to this his secret bombings of Cambodia, the enemies list, and etc., and the youth of today probably think of the 70s as a simpler time.
Which, in a way, they were. Somewhere it is written, by David Thomson (I think–I’m not going to look it up, either), that the films of the 1970s are so deeply cynical because the nation as a whole, the movie-going audience, was at its heart optimistic. Seeing a film like The Conversation was meant to anger and inspire, to make us understand that we didn’t necessarily have to have crooks in the White House. Today, I think, we’re pretty much resigned to having crooks in the White House, men who are more than willing to lie and plunder at will. And the crimes have become so abundant that you could not make The Conversation without its seeming deeply partisan at best, or, the stuff of crackpots at worst.
But The Conversation still stirs your conscience, and it’s a sly and subtle masterpiece by a filmmaker who was in-between making two of the most highly regarded films in history. It still boggles my mind that Francis Ford Coppola followed up The Godfather with this nearly-forgotten film about a professional eavesdropper.
The facts: Harry Caul (Gene Hackman, never better) is a professional surveillance man who is hired by the Director (Robert Duvall) of a giant conglomerate to listen in on the conversation between his wife and her suitor. Harry is the consummate professional with a crack staff and eavesdropping equipment that his competitors would give their eyeteeth to possess. With a great deal of finagling, Harry is able to piece together the details of this couple’s discussion. But now, Harry is concerned: in the past, his efforts to capture a secret meeting of a union official resulted in the brutal murder of a family. A shy, retiring, and paranoid man, who never indulges his secrets to anyone, Harry slowly begins to think that his recent work might result in this pair being killed as well.
Like the aforementioned films, especially Parallax View and Chinatown, our hero ends up the victim, powerless against the forces of capitalism, Big Brother, and just plain evil. Like Jake Gittes in Chinatown (also nominated for Best Picture that year–it could have been the strongest Oscar year in history were it not for Towering Inferno), Harry slowly becomes obsessed with protecting this couple, but, like Gittes, is utterly incapable of protecting even himself. Unlike Gittes, however, Harry is a loner, who refuses to trust even his assistant, his girlfriend, and a man whose occupation is subject to spying even by his competitors. Cloaked in a gauzy trenchcoat or seen through shower curtains and glass blocks, (like the caul of his last name) Harry tries to remain at a distance, usually muttering that he’s “not responsible” for the results of his surveillance, but knowing full well that’s a lie. Eventually, in an interesting nod to Psycho, there is a brutal murder, and not the least what he expected. In the now-famous denouement, he realizes that, in spite of his extreme efforts, he, too, is under surveillance and rips his apartment to shreds looking for a bug.
Whenever I watch The Conversation, I get quite uneasy. The plot is not necessarily brilliant, and, in fact, repeated viewings show off a few of its rusty spots. But Coppola and Hackman work in tandem to give us the plight of an everyman slowly drowning in the realization that his actions, whether intended or not, have ramifications that are unpleasant to say the least, and that the world is no longer an innocent place. This, from a movie that is over thirty years old. In the day, did my mother and grandparents still think the government was capable of the high standards that seem to exist only in myth today? In a time when the government admits to bugging millions of its people, and does so with impunity, Harry’s travails seem slight. After all, the film is about murder and corporations, not terrorism and the government, about which we are supremely concerned.
So now do we look at The Conversation as nostalgia, a time when one man would still sacrifice his life and career, when his defeat was a rallying cry, when we still cared that people were bugged and destroyed by a reckless government. Or is it as earnest and silly as John Wayne’s World War II films? A relic from lost time, a lost attitude?
I still hope that, like Harry, we cannot deny responsibility forever.
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