Director Francis Ford Coppola was at his professional peak in the 1970s, rolling a series of acclaimed films, including two of the three Godfather productions. The Conversation, which came out in 1974, the same year as The Godfather II, found Coppola competing with himself at the Oscars.
The Conversation also won the Cannes Film Festival’s highest honour (called the Grand Prix in those years, later the Palme d’Or). It’s not hard to see why the Cannes jury, led by French director Rene Clair, were swayed by Coppola’s European-style film about a surveillance expert who starts to question his work.
The Conversation can be rented on Prime Video. Meanwhile, the PVR Inox multiplex chain is re-releasing The Godfather trilogy. The Godfather will be out on September 12, followed by The Godfather Part II on October 17 and The Godfather Part III on November 14.
The Conversation stars Gene Hackman in one of his most well-regarded roles. Hackman plays Harry Caul, who is considered one of the best in his profession. Harry’s clients include governments and companies. He takes pride in his work, designing his own equipment and coming up with innovative ways to eavesdrop.
One assignment revolves around a pair of lovers. Harry and his colleagues, including Stanley (John Cazale), pick up snatches of the conversation between the man and the woman at a public place. This sequence is a filmmaking feat for the way in which co-editor and sound designer Walter Murch intersperses the dialogue with background music and the sounds made by the listening equipment.
When Harry hears the recording over and over again, the conversation between the couple appears to reveal new meaning – such as a murder. But it’s hard to tell whether Harry is imagining things or has actually stumbled upon a possible crime. Like Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) – which Coppola cites as one of his inspirations – nothing is as straightforward as it seems.
The 1970s saw several conspiracy thrillers about the ways in which governments and companies inserted themselves into the lives of ordinary Americans for nefarious purposes. Alan J Pakula’s Paranoia Trilogy – Klute, The Parallax View, All The President’s Men – came out in this decade.
The Parallax View was released in the same year as The Conversation, but both films are quite different. While The Parallax View is about a shadowy organisation that conducts political assassinations, The Conversation is an intimate character study. Harry is secretive, cautious by nature, prone to looking over his shoulder. He has pangs of guilt over his work.
Walter Murch, who frequently collaborated with Coppola, spoke to the writer Michael Ondaatje about ambiguity and elusiveness in Coppola’s film. “Francis was interested in following an anonymous person and really investigating the fabric of his life,” Murch told Ondaatje in The Conversations – Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. “It was a courageous act on his part never to flesh out the story of the murder that finally happens,” Murch added.
The theme of a “bugger”, as Harry is called, developing unbidden feelings for his targets was taken up in a bigger way in The Lives of Others (2006). In Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s German film, an intelligence agent becomes sympathetic towards a dissident playwright and his lover. Some scenes of the agent listening closely to clandestinely recorded conversations directly pay tribute to Coppola’s modest masterpiece.
Also start the week with these films:
In Korean thriller ‘Sleep’, the horrors of modern marriage
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