The Conversation
Francis Ford Coppola (1974)
Francis Ford Coppola, inspired by the perception vs reality conundrum of Antonioni’s Blow-Up and anxiety about the developing techniques of surveillance and wiretapping, started writing the script that became The Conversation in the late 1960s. It was a coincidence that the film finally saw the light of day in early 1974, when the Watergate scandal was continuously in the headlines. Topical it may have been but this remains a fascinating film more than forty years on. The sound-recording technology that generates the plot, though now antique, is as spooky as ever. (Its antiquity may actually increase its spookiness – certainly its strangeness.) Because The Conversation is a compelling character study, it is genuinely a psychological thriller.
Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), who now runs his own surveillance company in San Francisco, has the professional reputation of being ‘the best bugger on the West Coast’. With his colleague Stan (John Cazale) and several freelance operatives, Harry bugs the conversation of a young woman and man (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest), two among a crowd of people in San Francisco’s Union Square. Operatives stationed at different points around the Square record the conversation, some of which is picked up immediately. The pair express a fear of being watched. They talk about meeting in a hotel room a few days hence. When they see a tramp out cold on a park bench, the woman says:
‘Every time I see one of those old guys, I always think the same thing … I always think that he was once somebody’s baby boy. Really, I do. I think he was once somebody’s baby boy, and he had a mother and a father who loved him, and now there he is, half dead on a park bench …’
Much of the rest of what’s said is muffled or distorted by the hubbub of background noise. After Harry’s painstaking work to merge and filter the various tape-recordings, the words are entirely audible but their meaning remains ambiguous. The conversation is thus the auditory equivalent of the photograph in Blow-Up but paranoia, which is mostly implicit in Antonioni’s film, is salient in Coppola’s, thanks to the personality of his main character.
Harry Caul lives alone in an apartment protected by a triple-lock door. To describe the inside of the place as sparsely furnished is putting it mildly. There is a telephone but Harry makes calls only from pay phones. His office, occupying part of a warehouse, is enclosed in wire mesh. He regularly visits and sleeps with a woman (Teri Garr) but she is frustrated that she still knows next to nothing about him. This pathologically private protagonist, superbly played by Gene Hackman, is a memorable creation, right down to his name. Harry is ordinary; Caul has a glum, colourless sound but a rich significance. A caul is part of the amniotic sac that may cover a baby’s head at birth, and in the context of the film, it connotes both a covering and an innate condition. Harry wears, in all weathers, a mac – like a suit of armour, except that it’s made of thin, translucent material. His feelings of paranoia seem inseparable from his propensity to a twofold guilt – a function of his strict Catholicism and the legacy of a past wiretapping job that resulted in the murder of three people.
In spite of his elaborate precautions, Harry is disturbed to discover, almost from the start of the film, that he is accessible, and therefore vulnerable. He returns home from supervising the Union Square recording to find a birthday present waiting for him inside the apartment. At a surveillance convention taking place in San Francisco, Bernie Moran (Allen Garfield), a crude showman whom Harry despises professionally and personally, startles him twice – first by revealing what he knows about Harry’s earlier career, then with a practical joke: Moran presents him with a freebie pen that conceals a recording device. Harry becomes obsessed with the Union Square dialogue and convinced that the client (Robert Duvall) for whom he recorded it means to harm the overheard couple: it becomes clear that the woman is the client’s wife and the man she was with her lover. The momentum of this thriller thread builds in tandem with Coppola’s dramatisation of Harry’s increasing inability to find a safe place for himself – in the outside world, his apartment or his mind.
In the event, he fails not only to prevent a murder from happening but also to guess who is to be murdered and by whom. In The Conversation’s famous closing episode, Harry receives a warning on the apartment telephone. The voice of the client’s creepy assistant (Harrison Ford) warns him, ‘We’ll be listening to you’. Harry takes the apartment to pieces – the floorboards, the cheap Madonna figurine that was virtually its only ornament – in a fruitless attempt to discover the bug he now knows must be there.
The Conversation’s schematic structure and realistic style occasionally conflict. It’s unlikely that anti-social Harry – shortly after being enraged that he let his guard slip with the bugged pen and, as a result, was publicly made a fool of – would go back to his workplace with Moran and other convention delegates for a late-night drinking session. This extended and important episode is developed and played so credibly, however, that you almost forget its inherent implausibility. And Harry has what is a bad dream in more ways than one: it’s too neatly self-revealing. The film’s strengths hugely outweigh its imperfections, though. With the considerable help of Walter Murch, Coppola uses sound – especially the numerous replays of the key conversation – to discomfiting effect. (Murch served as both supervising editor and sound designer. According to Wikipedia, he ‘had more or less a free hand during the editing process, since Coppola was already working on The Godfather: Part II at the time’.) David Shire’s eerie score is cleverly used too. There are passages in which it’s so insistent that it’s nagging. The music will then disappear for some time. These intervals naturally ensure impact each time it returns.
The one activity that seems to give Harry Caul something approaching pleasure is, alone in his apartment, putting on a jazz record and accompanying it on tenor saxophone. At first, this choice of relaxant, cool and stylish, seems too obviously un-Harry-like but its meaning is transformed in the closing scene. The sax is the only thing in the apartment that Harry doesn’t destroy. He sits among the debris playing it. The instrument, it now seems clear, is where the listening device that he couldn’t find is located. The repetition of the Union square conversation on Harry’s equipment reverberates in his head and our heads too. This increases sympathy with the isolated, unloved Harry Caul – and not just because the ‘he was once somebody’s baby boy’ refrain seems to refer increasingly to him. The Conversation taps into audience unease that someone is eavesdropping on our lives. That unease, potent at the time the film came out, is enduring. Secret recording devices may not be what they were in the 1970s but we can always worry about internet algorithms.
20 October 2017