THE CONVERSATION by Francis Ford Coppola
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica
There are some works of art that are both obviously derivative of others and obviously inferior to the originals. Those simply ape the earlier work, tweak a few minor things, and try to pass off their theft as ‘homage.’ The Conversation (1974), written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, is not one of those minor works.
Though it has an indebtedness to Michelangelo Antonioni’s brilliant 1966 film Blowup, The Conversation does not merely ape that film’s existential dilemma of an accidental photograph possibly cluing its lead character into murder. Instead, Coppola’s film probes far more deeply into its lead character Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) to see what might cause a man to misinterpret reality to suit his own psychological needs.
Another major difference is that the tale in Blowup is wholly accidental, whereas the story The Conversation is built upon is an outgrowth of the deliberate and paid-for actions of Caul, the leading West Coast surveillance expert hired by the mysterious Director (Robert Duvall) of a giant corporation to spy on his wife Ann (Cindy Williams) and her lover Mark (Frederic Forrest).
The Conversation opens around Christmastime, with Caul and his entourage tailing and listening in to the conversation of the two lovers as they stroll in Union Square, an open air park in downtown San Francisco. The opening zoom-down from a sniper’s eye level focuses on a mime (Robert Shields) who is annoying people in the square. Eventually he sidles up to and mimics Caul, who walks away. (The opening scene was filmed by Haskell Wexler, and the rest of the film by Bill Butler, who took over after Wexler and Coppola had a falling out.) The fragmented bits of conversation Caul eventually pieces together leads him to believe that the couple is being set up for murder by his employer.
Caul is a lonely man who plays saxophone in his apartment, along with jazz records, but never in public. Outside his window, an apartment house across the street is being systematically torn down, just as his life soon will be. Despite Caul’s professional expertise and paranoia about his own privacy (he has three locks on his apartment door), a female neighbor knows his birthday, and when he gets home we see that she — or someone else — has gotten into his apartment and left a bottle of wine. His mail has also been snooped through. At that point, Caul reams out his landlady, and says his mail will no longer be delivered to his apartment.
Even his girlfriend, Amy (Teri Garr), knows his habits — such as spying on her — yet feels excluded from his life. So does his assistant Stan (John Cazale), who idolizes Caul. Stan eventually leaves his employ to work for Caul’s East Coast competitor William P. Moran (Allen Garfield).
All of these pressures, in addition to lingering memories from an assignment he did years ago, weigh on his mind. In that case, which Moran says is legendary because no one knows how Caul got the information, the facts Caul dug up apparently led to a triple murder. With that on his mind, Caul — who also happens to be a practicing Roman Catholic who goes to confession — is an utterly unreliable narrator. The viewer cannot take all that occurs in the film as the absolute truth. This also accounts for his professional demeanor of not caring about the reasons he is hired — his assignments are just jobs to him. Even so, he violates his own self-professed beliefs because of his guilt.
As in Blowup, there seems to be a murder, and Harry seems to witness it when he takes a hotel room next to Room 773 of the Jack Tar Hotel, a while before the tryst time. He listens in to what is happening, and hears what appears to be violence. The audience, however, never sees what really happens.
There are some subjective shots, all hidden by frosted glass. We see blood, and Harry believes the young wife has been killed. The references to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho are clear. He later breaks into the room and finds no evidence of the murder, until he flushes the toilet, and blood wells up. A few years later, a similar bloody sequence would be used in Stanley Kubrick’s impressionistic The Shining and more recently in the Audrey Tautou mystery film Dirty Pretty Things, in which a hotel clerk (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers a human heart in a toilet.
Now, if the murder really did occur in Room 773, it would have been impossible to remove all the blood. Caul even runs his fingers under the rim of the bathtub stopper, but can find no trace of blood. That the blood wells up only after the flush is just too symbolic to be real, in the interior of the film’s universe.
We also get no confirmation from other sources that any of this is real. Caul tries to confront the director, but he is tossed out of the building by security. He then sees the young wife, still alive, in a car.
Later, there is a press coterie following the young couple. Harry now believes that they are the ones who have murdered the director, for he sees in a newspaper headline that the Director was killed in a car crash. Even the director’s young assistant, Martin Stett (Harrison Ford), seems to be in on the murder - if there was one.
Earlier, Stett had wanted to take the tapes from Caul, for his $15,000 fee. Caul had refused the offer, believing he could only turn them over to the director. He and Stett tussled and Stett warned him to stay uninvolved: ‘Now look, don’t get involved in this, Mr. Caul. Those tapes are dangerous. You heard them. You know what I mean. Someone may get hurt. Mr. Caul, be careful.’ While leaving, Caul sees Ann and Mark in an elevator.
Caul’s paranoia goes back to a single sentence that Forrest’s character, Mark, utters to Ann, ‘He’d kill us if he had the chance.’ Throughout the film, Caul hears the emphasis on kill, meaning the couple feared the director’s wrath. After the director is dead, Harry believes the emphasis was on us.
He gets threatening phone calls to his apartment, telling him he’s under surveillance. They could be from Stett or Moran — who seems to have been hired by Stett, Ann, and Mark, or the director, as well, to spy on Caul. Earlier, Caul had fallen prey to Moran’s bugging by a free pen — something out of a James Bond film knock off — given at a surveillance convention, and had his information regarding the director’s case stolen from him by a blond woman, Meredith (Elizabeth MacRae), who Moran had hired to seduce him.
Caul is now going off the deep end. He tears apart his apartment looking for the bug, to no avail. His apartment is left in ruins — even the floorboards are ripped up, as the film ends with Caul playing his jazz saxophone as the camera swings back and forth like a security camera. Still, it is clearly not a security camera, for we have seen Coppola’s God’s-eye view from the same position earlier in the film.
The bug, if there is one, is an audio bug. Whether or not it is real is the question. What is real is Caul’s mental breakdown. Even a plastic Madonna is destroyed, but to no avail. The only thing he hasn’t ripped apart is his saxophone strap, which may have been bugged when, at the convention, we see another saxophonist in the area of Caul and Stett. Since we know Stett is playing both sides against the middle in the power struggle between Ann, Mark, the director, and Caul, it’s conceivable that, since he likely hired Moran to bug Caul, who hired Meredith to seduce Caul, he’s also gotten, or hired Moran to get, the saxophonist to somehow switch straps with Caul.
That’s as likely as any other explanation, including the fact that Caul could be going insane and imagining it all. Also of import is Caul’s feelings of complicity in someone’s murder (past or present), and the fact that Moran, or someone else, seems to have displaced him as king of the surveillance hill. His own fragile ego at having been bested is part and parcel of his internal collapse.
The film is awash with symbolism, starting with the name of Harry Caul. A caul is part of the embryonic sac, the amniotic shroud that sometimes remains on a newborn baby after birth. It is translucent and seen as an omen in many cultures. Another symbol is that, irrespective of the weather, Caul always wears a translucent raincoat. Caul can often see things others cannot, but misinterprets them for to him they are translucent. He sees general outlines, but few specifics. He even has plastic sheets set up all about his warehouse office. Late in the film, Caul even dreams that he meets the young wife in a park. He warns her of the danger and also speaks of his own life, and his paralysis as a child.
Now, could it be that all of this is imagined by Caul? In his version of reality, the director has been strangled, though there was clearly a car accident. If the corpse had been stashed in a car, surely the strangulation would be discovered by a competent coroner, even if a plastic bag was about the director’s neck at the time? That it is not suggests that Caul has made up much of this plot himself, and that it is his violation of his ethical principle to remain uninvolved that has built up a murder out of nothing. This is the mark of a great character, and Harry Caul, unlikable as he is, is one of the great film characters.
The Conversation is also one of the greatest character studies ever filmed. It deserved to be nominated for three Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Sound, Best Original Screenplay), and although it lost out to Coppola’s other 1974 film, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation did win the Golden Palm at Cannes.
The Paramount-released DVD is excellent, containing the original 1974 eight-minute-long making-of featurette, ‘Close Up On The Conversation,’ the original trailer, and two outstanding commentary tracks. The first is by Coppola, who, along with Werner Herzog, is one of the few directors who understand both the technical aspects of filmmaking and the need to speak naturally to a lay listener about the film, thus avoiding the usual commentary fellatrics. The second commentary is by film and sound editor Walter Murch, and it is every bit as good as Coppola’s, without repeating too many of the same points. Murch edited the film for a year while Coppola was shooting The Godfather Part II. Both commentaries were recorded in 2000, when the DVD was released. The film is presented in 1.66:1 anamorphic widescreen format.
In his track, Coppola speaks of various things including similarities between Caul and Joseph K, from Franz Kafka’s The Trial, the fact that Harry shares his first name with the lead character from Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and the fact that Harry Caul’s last name was originally Call, but a secretary’s typo changed it to Caul. (Coppola preferred it that way, for all the aforementioned symbolic reasons.) The director provides good insights into the camera technique of allowing characters to walk out of frame, and then, as if robotically, panning after them too late. He also explains how he gave Harrison Ford free reign to expand his Martin Stett character, and the effect that repeating certain scenes and motifs has on the viewer.
There are also trivial tidbits that enliven the commentary to make it seem as if Coppola is actually speaking to you alone. He recalls that Hackman and Duvall were roommates, and Duvall did his brief role as a favor to him and Hackman. He also explains how the dream sequence was originally part of the film’s end, but he had trouble shooting it so that idea was scrapped. The scene would later be used elsewhere in the film, as it is the only glimpse the viewer has into Caul’s past.
Murch is as good a commentator as Coppola, albeit a bit more technical. He explains that the opening shot was the first ever filmed with a computer-programmed zoom for precision’s sake. He also states that he did record two versions of Mark’s comment, ‘He’d kill us if he had the chance.’
In his commentary, Coppola expresses some regret that he went with that choice, but Murch explains that audiences initially failed to get the point unless there was a difference in emphasis. The difference, however, can be internally explained away as being part of Caul’s own subjective filter, a result of his guilt over his role in the prior triple murder.
Another point Murch makes is that we, the audience, have some distinct advantages over Caul, in that we can see scenes that Caul only hears. But, if many of the scenes are merely Caul’s subjective reimaginings of events he only hears, we may actually be even further detached from what really went on, since we are only privy to Caul’s versions of reality. Murch also explains that the film has to give some poetic license to Caul when his audio techniques flesh out background conversations from white noise that were not technically feasible then or now.
It is a shame that in the nearly thirty years since the 1970s, Coppola has never made a film that comes close to the power of his work from that era. Despite its debt to Blowup, The Conversation is a far more realistic and multi-layered film. That does not mean it’s better than Blowup; it’s just not a rip off. Coppola’s film is far more internalized, even if a little less subjective than Antonioni’s. The seeming disconnect between objective reality and what is witnessed by the audience only deepens the desire to rewatch the film.
Particularly impressive is the fact that the film’s lead is the sort of character other films ignore in order to focus on one of the players in the love triangle, or perhaps Martin Stett. Caul is a functionary, an apparatchik — yet, he’s real, and his struggle is every bit as interesting as that of the ’sexier characters.’
In The Conversation, Coppola heeds Juvenal’s query from his sixth Satire: ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ (’Who watches the watchmen?’) There are many watchers in this film, yet the final watcher is the audience. And what they watch is greatness, simple in its complexity. The Conversation is a great, simple, small film. Never too long at an hour and fifty-three minutes, it may well be Coppola’s best.
The film was very timely, considering the Watergate scandal, but the idea came to him in 1967. Shooting began in late 1972, and wrapped shortly before Watergate came to light. Even so, The Conversation has been lost among the three other titanic films he made in the 1970s: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now. Whereas those three films were operatic, The Conversation is a chamber piece.
Apropos of that, the piano-only soundtrack by Coppola’s brother-in-law David Shire, so reminiscent of Erik Satie piano pieces, is perfect. As Coppola says in his commentary, the piano is a lonely instrument; as lonely as Harry Caul — or an unanswered question.
© Dan Schneider
The Conversation (1974). Director: Francis Ford Coppola. Screenplay: Francis Ford Coppola. Cast: Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, Allen Garfield.
Writer, critic, and poet Dan Schneider is the editor of Cosmoetica, which he describes as “the most popular non-commercial literary site online.”
Other reviews by Dan Schneider can be found at Cinemension, Cosmoetica’s “film division.”
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Schneider, and they may not reflect the views of the Alternative Film Guide.
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