The Conversation

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The Conversation
Directed by	Francis Ford Coppola
Produced by	Francis Ford Coppola
Written by	Francis Ford Coppola
Starring	Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)	April 7, 1974 (NYC only)
Running time	113 min.
Language	English
Budget	$1,600,000
IMDb profile

The Conversation is an Academy Award nominated 1974 mystery thriller about audio surveillance, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Teri Garr, and Cindy Williams; it also features an early performance by Harrison Ford and an uncredited appearance from Robert Duvall.

Contents 1 Synopsis 2 Background 3 Music 4 Awards 5 See also 6 External links 7 Notes

[edit] Synopsis

Harry Caul (Hackman) is a paranoid surveillance expert running his own company. Caul is obsessed with his own privacy; his apartment is almost bare behind its triple-locked door, he uses pay phones to make calls and claims to have no home telephone, and his office is enclosed in wire mesh in a corner of a much larger warehouse. Caul is utterly professional at work, but he finds personal contact difficult. He is exquisitely uncomfortable in dense crowds and withdrawn and taciturn in more intimate situations; he is also reticent and secretive with work colleagues. He is nondescript in appearance, except for his habit of wearing a translucent plastic raincoat virtually everywhere he goes, even when it is not raining. Despite his insistence that his professional code means that he is not responsible for worrying about the actual content of the conversations he records or the uses to which his clients put his surveillance activities, he is in fact racked by guilt over a past wiretap job that left three persons dead; his sense of guilt is sharpened by his devout Catholicism. His one hobby is playing along with his favourite jazz records on a tenor saxophone in the privacy of his apartment.

Caul has taken on the task of monitoring a couple's conversation as they walk through a crowded public square. The challenging task is accomplished, but Caul feels increasingly agonized over his doubts about the actual meaning of the conversation and about what may happen to the couple once the client hears the tape. He plays the tape again and again through the movie, refining its accuracy (by catching one key — though crucially ambiguous — phrase hidden under the sound of a street musician: "He'd kill us if he got the chance") and constantly reinterpreting its meaning in the light of what he knows and what he guesses. Caul avoids handing in the tape to the aide of the man who commissioned the surveillance; he then finds himself under increasing pressure from the aide and is himself followed, tricked, and listened in on, the tape eventually stolen from him in a moment when his guard is down. Caul's appalled efforts to forestall tragedy ultimately fail — because, it turns out, the conversation doesn't mean what he thought it did, and the tragedy he anticipated isn't the one that eventually happens. In the final scene of the film, Caul discovers that his own apartment is bugged and gradually takes it to pieces in an unsuccessful effort to discover the bug, eventually destroying everything there (even, after a moment of hesitation, his plastic figurine of the Madonna) except for his beloved tenor saxophone: at the film's end he's left sitting amidst the wreck, blowing a solo. The last shot, taken from a high angle, pans from left to right as if filmed by a surveillance camera, showing the wrecked apartment.

[edit] Background

Though the script was written in the mid-1960s, the film was released shortly after the Watergate scandal broke and thus reflected contemporary issues of personal responsibility and the encroachment of technology on privacy.

Coppola has cited Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup as a key influence on his conceptualization of the film's themes, such as surveillance versus participation, and perception versus reality.^{[citation needed]} There are also several overt borrowings from Blowup, notably the presence of mimes in both films and the central sequences involving the enhancement of a medium to reveal details previously unnoticed (photography in Blowup, audio tapes in The Conversation). Coppola has also noted the influence of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf on the figure of Harry Caul and (in the horrific hotel bathroom scene) Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.^{[citation needed]}

Much of the style of the film owes a large debt to Walter Murch, the editor and sound designer. Murch had more or less a free hand during the editing process, since Coppola was already working on The Godfather II at the time.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Music

The Conversation features an austere piano score composed and performed by David Shire. The score was created before the film was shot.^[1] On some cues, Shire took the taped sounds of the piano and distorted them in different ways to create alternative tonalities to round out the score. The music is intended to capture the isolation and paranoia of protagonist Harry Caul. The score was released on CD by Intrada Records.

[edit] Awards

The film is consistently listed on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. It won the 1974 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards for 1974:

• Academy Award for Best Picture (Francis Ford Coppola)
• Academy Award for Sound (Walter Murch & Art Rochester)
• Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay (Francis Ford Coppola)

[edit] See also

The 1998 film Enemy of the State also features Hackman as a security expert who, this time, goes clandestine so as not to leave any trace of his moves. Some fans have speculated that this character is, in fact, an older and wiser Harry Caul.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] External links

• Analysis of The Conversation
• The Conversation at the Internet Movie Database
• Alternative Film Guide review of The Conversation
• comprehensive review

[edit] Notes

1. ^ discussion of soundtrack

Francis Ford Coppola v • d • e
The Godfather series	The Godfather (1972) | The Godfather Part II (1974) | The Godfather Part III (1990)
1960s	Battle Beyond the Sun (with Aleksandr Kozyr and M. Karzhukov) | The Bellboy and the Playgirls (with Fritz Umgelter and Jack Hill) | Tonight for Sure | Dementia 13 | You're a Big Boy Now | Finian's Rainbow | The Rain People
1970s	The Conversation | Apocalypse Now
1980s	One from the Heart | The Outsiders | Rumble Fish | The Cotton Club | Peggy Sue Got Married | Gardens of Stone | Tucker: The Man and His Dream | New York Stories (with Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese)
1990s	Bram Stoker's Dracula | Jack | The Rainmaker
2000s	Youth Without Youth
Productions	The Junky's Christmas (1993) | Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) | Don Juan DeMarco (1995) | Lanai-Loa (1998) | The Florentine (1999) | The Virgin Suicides (1999)

Preceded by The Hireling tied with Scarecrow

Palme d'Or 1974

Succeeded by Chronicle of the Years of Fire