The Conversation (1974)

Several weeks ago I noticed that Roger Ebert has said that The Conversation was a must watch movie even to this day. I looked into it and seeing that it was written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, most likely known for his Godfather films, I had a pretty good idea why he would say something like that. It may have a super boring title, but it's actually about spying on people and listening into their conversation and trying to figure out what it all means. I'll get into what I thought more after the jump.


Gene Hackman stars as private investigator Harry Caul, who is known for being able to get surveillance on anybody. He's given a mysterious job to spy on two young, seemingly normal people. A couple in fact. Their conversation seems normal enough, but it's fragmented and disjointed, jumping subjects erratically. He studies and analyzes the recordings he's gotten of their conversation, but so much of it is incomprehensible because they were in a very busy park at the time, that he has to use all his tricks and knowledge of editing the sound to get it all to the point that he can understand it. Finally he starts piecing together fragments and sections of the overall conversation which leads him to believe his own work may have just put the lives of these two people in grave danger.

Obviously sound is a big part of this movie. I really liked the scenes in which he is modifying the various recordings that he got from all different sources, taking a few minutes of clear recording from one tape, and then when that starts becoming unclear, use the next few minutes from another tape. Eventually he even gets into frequency modulation and noise reduction to be able to hear everything fully. Along with the sound though there's a subtle music theme going along with it because he plays the saxophone in his spare time. He only does it a few times, but it's interesting to see a character who is normally so high strung and agitated just sort of zone out while he plays, even thought it looked really fake to me.

Visual style could be studied for ages in this film which is all about sound

Speaking of the characters, Gene Hackman does a really good job of playing the serious, all business, totally paranoid investigator. Being that his job is all about surveillance, he's become overly watchful of his personal life. It affects every aspect of his life, even his love life. He never tells his girlfriend anything about himself, not even his own birthday. And when curiosity to know the man she loves gets the best of her and she starts asking questions, he simply becomes suspicious and takes off. His paranoia hits all new heights of course when this latest job starts becoming more bizarre and it seems like someone is really following him. This someone is actually played by a super young pre-Star Wars Harrison Ford. He was really good as the creepy suit who kept showing up everywhere. Remember, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean someone isn't really following you.

I'm only briefly going to touch on the visuals of this movie, because I haven't studied film, and so I feel under-qualified to talk about it at length. Basically, as a regular plain old dude watching a movie, this one had some weird angles and stuff going on. You can see in the picture above all the crazy reflections on the glass, and if you look at the framing of the image below, it makes the door frame all angular and odd. These scenes seem to link up to when he's most paranoid and agitated now that I think about it. This is obviously a movie that could be studied and read into like crazy by film students, so I'm going to stop right here before I go crazy.

Such a simple shot, but it becomes odd when you look at all the angles

In the end I really liked the way the calm cool and collected investigator becomes more and more freaked out and paranoid as the tables are suddenly turned on him. The hunter has become the hunted. It also seems like Enemy of the State could be a sequel to this film in a funny way. The mystery was interesting too because once again I didn't see the ending coming, and just for that I could recommend it. However, if I had to complain about something, or at least warn you about, is that this is a really slowly paced movie. That combined with a few scenes of soft jazz nearly had me falling asleep at one point. The mystery isn't overly complex or have twists in the plot, it's just more of a "what's going to happen at the end" type deal. Check it out, but make sure you have something on hand to keep you awake, just in case.