The Conversation

In the '70s, Francis Ford Coppola was known for making The Godfather movies, which have since been hailed as the greatest movies ever made. But right in between the first and second Godfather, Coppola made another masterpiece—a small-scale, almost minimalist examination of privacy entitled The Conversation. It's easy to understand why this movie is overlooked and not as well-known, but even though it was made in between two giants, it’s definitely a masterpiece in its own right.

What I'm about to say may spark disagreement from my readers (all three of you), but I'm going to state this nevertheless: this movie features Gene Hackman hands-down in his greatest film role. This is a different Hackman than the one we know as Popeye Doyle from The French Connection, or Lex Luthor from the Christopher Reeve Superman films, or Little Bill from Clint Eastwood’s (overrated) Unforgiven. Because here in The Conversation, Hackman plays Harry Caul, a wallflower who desperately retreats from the spotlight rather than shines outwardly with his personality. Caul is a super-talented surveillance man who makes a business out of recording conversations for other people. Right as the movie opens, we're taken to a common area in San Francisco that's bustling during a weekday lunch hour, where Caul and his surveillance crew are surreptitiously following around a young couple and taping their conversation from multiple angles—a conversation which serves as the central focus of the movie.

The Conversation is a movie that explores the meaning of privacy, both worldly and personal. In the worldly sense, the movie came out right when Watergate was at its peak, so I can't help but wonder if Coppola was commenting on general surveillance and the infamous 18 and a half minutes of Watergate tape. In the person sense, Harry Caul is the embodiment of personal privacy, because he is an intensely private and guarded person. He keeps his interpersonal conversations to a minimum, and when he does talk, it’s only about business. His apartment door is bolted with no less than three locks, and when someone has to enter his apartment for any reason, he panics, feeling that his privacy has been violated. This was evidenced when he enters his apartment after taping the conversation at the start of the film, to hear an alarm going off and a bottle of wine left inside the door by his landlady (as a birthday gift). He then proceeds to call his landlady and ask her many probing questions, such as how she got into the apartment when he has the only key, how did she know it was his birthday, etc. Only subtly does he mask his anxiety of someone having entered his private sanctuary set far apart from the world.

Even when he's asked point-blank to tell someone about himself, as Teri Garr did early in the movie, he becomes visibly uncomfortable and dodges answering. Very clearly, he doesn't want anyone to know a thing about him. It's the same when he and his crew have a party at his office after the surveillance convention, when call-girl Meredith begins to ask him questions and he retreats from them. When he learns that Bernie Moran has taped that conversation with Meredith, intended purely as a prank, Caul reacts almost with rage, again feeling that his privacy has been cruelly violated.

In my time, I've known (and even dated) a few people who could be considered guarded, not letting anyone get too close to them for fear of making themselves vulnerable. I must confess, I have a hard time relating to this mindset, as I'm the kind of person who's willing to share so much about myself. Nevertheless, I use The Conversation as a way to get a peek into the mindset of someone who's guarded and private, because it genuinely makes me curious about them and their motivations. As to Harry Caul, only in his one dream do we as the audience begin to know what kind of man he is. In his dream, when he chases the young girl he taped at the beginning of the movie, he actually begins to tell her about himself in the hopes of gaining her trust, of somehow warning her that she may be in danger. The line that Hackman delivers at the end of this scene is not only written exquisitely but executed exquisitely, when he says, "I'm not afraid of death. . . . I am afraid of murder."

The conversation that Caul and his crew record is no different than any other assignment he receives, but when he goes to turn in the tapes, he starts to have second thoughts, and ends up grappling with a very young Harrison Ford for the tapes. Caul is given even more pause when Ford warns him, "These tapes are dangerous. Someone might get hurt." Thus begins Harry Caul's indecision over what to do with the tapes . . . because once, a conversation that Harry taped many years before resulted in tragedy, and Harry is still haunted by this. So he begins to wonder if he should intervene here, as a way to possibly make amends for before—hoping to prevent the young couple from possibly getting hurt.

Robert Duvall makes an unexpected appearance as the director (to whom Harry Caul was originally supposed to turn in the tapes), and the scene with them all in the boardroom holds me in awe each time I see it, for two reasons: 1) the silent intensity of the scene, the tension that arises from the director hearing the tapes, the fear by Harry of how these tapes will be used by the director against the young couple, and 2) because of the starpower in that scene (Gene Hackman, Harrison Ford, and Robert Duvall, all before they were megastars). Many other scenes in this movie are quietly intense, such as the dream that Harry has when he starts to talk about himself, the final scene of Harry tearing up his apartment, and all the scenes at the Jack Tarr hotel, where Harry gets the adjoining room and listens to all that happens.

In the end, though, Harry Caul learns a terrible lesson: that while taping and listening to a conversation can tell you a lot, the context of what is said can be interpreted in many ways . . . and not all interpretations are correct. This is the lesson that will haunt him for the rest of his days.

The final scene of the movie is pure magic, though, as it features Caul at his most vulnerable, where his privacy is threatened most directly. For after he comes to understand the true nature of the conversation that he and his crew taped, he gets a phone call from Harrison Ford, saying that they’re going to be watching him—and then we hear the recording made just then of Harry Caul playing his saxophone, which means that his apartment is now bugged . . . and Caul begins to tear his apartment to shreds looking for a bug. It’s unnerving to watch this scene, because you can feel his privacy come crashing down around him, leaving his most inner sanctum wide open.



It’s been said that The Conversation is the prequel to Will Smith’s 1998 film Enemy of the State, which also starred Hackman. The comparison is drawn because, in Enemy of the State, Hackman plays a former NSA agent named Brill who’s eerily similar to Harry Caul from The Conversation. Brill’s warehouse office in Baltimore is almost identical to Caul’s San Francisco office from The Conversation, and the only difference between the two characters is the absence in Enemy of the State of Hackman’s intensely-held privacy. But prequel or not, The Conversation is a definitive masterpiece from a master filmmaker. Various filmic elements of The Conversation escalated the tension for the viewer, and also symbolized the privacy and small-scale world sought by Caul. The entire soundtrack is solo piano, with just enough stretching of the notes to impart a sense of smallness and solitude to Harry’s world. The sound mixing is quite good, too! The garbling of the sound when Harry is recording and editing the conversation of the young couple is quite an authentic touch, and further serves to illustrate how the context of words can be misinterpreted by a second party. A perfect 10 for Coppola and Hackman.