Category: Blog Post

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.

The Lady Eve, 1941. Written and directed by lipstick-magnate Preston Sturges. Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Hank Fonda, Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette and Sturges stalwarts William Demarest, Eric Blore and Robert Greig.

Playing in Loring Park with Fat Kid Wednesdays; part of the Walker’s Summer Music and Movies.

Briefly: tonight, the Walker Art Center is bestowing us unworthies with oddball jazz and and an even more oddball movie in beautiful Loring Park at sunset. The Lady Eve, the story of Ale-brewing and snake-loving Hank Fonda’s run-in with con-lady Barb Stanwyck, is hilarious and quite sexy to boot. If you have anything else to do, you must be dead, at least from the neck up.

Some pills make you taller and some pills make you small

If you didn’t get a big enough laugh out of Bush’s petty moralizing at his stem cell research funding veto ceremony, here’s one for you:

Tim (I’m Only Looking Out for You) Pawlenty thinks the frequent television ads for prescription drugs are too much.

Yup, Tim’s bravely willing to fight the power of the pharmaceutical industry’s massive lobbying and political contribution muscle to make sure you’re properly informed by your doctor about which sleep or erection inducing medicine you should take. (Don’t forget, too, that the ads won’t tell you in which order to take said medicine, depending on your wife’s mood.)

Tim thinks that too many people are just going into their doctor and saying, “Gimme some of the uppers for my johnson and downers for afterwards,” without the benefit of an actual consultation with the expert on the other end of the prescription pen.

Tim, if you’re want to start regulating advertising that’s injurious to our health, you really ought to start with Coca Cola and all the rest of the crap that’s full of high fructose corn syrup.

Maybe if all those men who have lifestyle-induced diabetes ever ate a vegetable or took a walk, they wouldn’t have the infrequent erections and frequent urination that are keeping them awake in the first place. That will solve a lot of the pill problems right there.

There are no movie theaters in Saudi Arabia. Considering that there is no booze in the Kingdom of Saud, that there are no nightclubs, that 114 degree temperatures make sports all but impossible, and the shabobs (Arabic for young men) have to resort to driving like maniacs in order to let off steam, one would think they’d have a movie theater or two. But in the early 80s, the Saudi government decided to become a bit more pious and ban theaters altogether. And that’s a shame.

This does not mean that Saudis don’t watch movies. When the ban took place, it must have been a real boon for salesmen of home theaters: the early 80s, of course, marked the dawn of video. And everyone watches video in Saudi, catches Al Jazeera (also frowned upon) through their satellites, which rust by the thousands on the flat rooftops of this desert country. Theaters are gone, but film thrives in Saudi.

My wife and I were visiting friends at their home in the Aramco Oil Company compound in Dammam. The expats there, like most everyone in the world, have an insatiable hunger for movies. Problem is, they don’t like to leave the false safety of the high-walled paradise, and are afraid of both driving conditions and the rampant terrorists walking everywhere (I’m being facetious). Public video stores are only going to serve up the most innocuous fare, and I’m guessing that anything that’s even remotely dirty is going to be censored–much like the magazines, whose advertisements of midriff-exposed women have been blacked out with a permanent marker (there’s a job for you!)

However, like the clandestine alcohol market in Aramco (garage-distilled gin, a nasty concoction called ‘Sid’, and homemade wine that leans more toward vinegar), there’s a surreptitious fellow who runs a video store out of his home, utterly illegal, probably above-radar but tolerated for the pleasure it brings the employees. It’s a strange experience: we went to go return some movies and my friend suddenly pulled into the parking lot of an apartment complex and then walked right into this guy’s front door. There, on bookshelves in his living room, and across from a dirty kitchen, is the video library. He’s got all the new stuff, copied from DVD to video for those too cheap to pay the exorbitant DVD rental fee, everything but porn. An Indian guest worker took our money with utter indifference, while hovering in the shadows was his boss, an American or Englishman, slobbering over some meal and no doubt counting the rials dropping into his account.

Movies on vacation are usually numbing affairs: on the plane south from Amsterdam, fatigued beyond belief, I set down Bryson’s Brief History of Nearly Everything to watch Failure To Launch, which I didn’t realize was about freaks and prostitutes. Our friends have two amazing children, but like all kids nine and twelve, they love fare like the new Pink Panther, which was seen three times in the first week we were there, and was awful. But I managed to be a bully, forcing our kind hosts to watch Cache, which says more about terrorism than any film in recent memory. Everyone dug it, even the twelve-year-old, who we to shoo out of the room at a violent moment. There was also the documentary Control Room, about the Al Jazeera network, which Saudis keep a trained eye on, hungry for coverage of the Palestinian crisis, which boiled over while we were there.

Perhaps this is what makes this community so intriguing: you can get these movies, watch these shows, when you want, but not together. You cannot congregate and see Lagaan, as innocent a Bollywood film as you’re bound to see. Walking on the Jeddah boardwalk, you can buy pirated copies of the latest flicks (they had Superman Returns and Click) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (banned there) from a kid who can fold up his wares and bolt in a heartbeat (and did at the sight of a cop, setting up shop moments later).

According to the Arab News, there was a Saudi Film Festival playing in Jeddah while we were in-country. One of the films was in black-and-white, and dedicated to Charlie Chaplin. However, according to Muhammed Salam, the deputy manager of the Jeddah Science and Technology Center (who was sponsoring the fest), “The films are considerate of the values and traditions of Saudi Arabia. This is an impressively unique and rare collection of movies that we didn’t know about before and carries a meaningful cultural message different to the nonsense that we see on satellite TV.” Which means they’re government approved, uncritical, and probably not worth the time it takes to see them.

Not an hour from the city of Dammam is the island kingdom of Bahrain, which is where Saudis go to do the things they cannot do at home, namely drink and see movies. One expat, who dropped his family off at the airport, made a beeline to see Mission:Impossible 3 and X-Men 3 back-to-back. “Well, he certainly got his fill of sequels,” our host said. This fellow could have spent the equivalent of two bucks on a bootleg, which look as if they were shot with handheld cameras from row three, and are frequently out of synch.

So for three short weeks (the time just flew–it was an incredible trip) we did not get the pleasure of the big screen, except to watch the Germany/Argentina World Cup match on a drive-in sized screen by the Persian Gulf, while shabobs smoked sheeshas (hookahs) that smelled of sweet apple.

But a movie would be a wonderful thing to see in this desert, especially considering the nationalities present and the food: seeing an Indian film anywhere (even Minneapolis) is a joy not just for the madness that will unfold onscreen, but because you can eat piping hot pakoras with them, and drink sweet tea. As per the custom, you’d have to have a separate-but-equal (again I’m facetious) section for men and families (the families have to hide their women from the watchful eyes of shabobs), but theater balconies would probably be perfect–and who needs windows in a theater?

On the return flight, fried again from jet-lag and listless sleep, I was hungry for a movie, any movie. Or so I thought. King Kong, which I’d missed last Christmas, was so awful I couldn’t continue. Oddly enough, there was a bat-shit crazy film called from 1974 called 11 Harrowhouse, starring Charles Grodin, Candace Bergen, James Mason, John Geilgud, and Trevor Howard. Who the hell thought to show this thing, of all possible films? Awful, not available on DVD (it will probably never see the light of a laser beam), and baffling: Charles Grodin plays this kooky, swingin’-70s guy who gets involved in a jewel heist. There’s free love, stickin’ it to the man, and making funny faces out of diamonds in peanut butter. For two hours, flying over the Atlantic, I was back in time to Channel 5’s Sunday afternoon movies of my youth. The film was even grainy and hard to see. But it was better than She’s the Man.

And now I’m back: to the land where women can walk around without black robes from top to bottom, where I can have a beer before sleep, and where, sadly, there is no crisis in the middle east–we can ignore it with impunity. Or so it would seem: last night, on the big screen, I took in, with a crowd of first-responders, Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.

A REMINDER: In what might be the best venue yet, The Monster of Phantom Lake is playing at the late-late show–11:30pm at the Woodbury 10 Theater. Cost is a slim $4. Frankly, a late show like this would be even better served by quaffing a few, but then I’m trying to make up for three weeks of sobriety.