An aerial view of the plaza in Union Square, San Francisco. Neatly divided by paths and greenery, its rectangular length is crowded with people. The noise of their indistinct chatter swirls through the air. Hesitantly, the camera moves in from its omniscient height to study them more closely. As it does so, the sound suddenly distorts, destroying the illusion of distance and cohesion.
So begins Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, a quietly devastating thriller which turns 50 this month. The film, written by its director, follows Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a secretive surveillance expert. Harry prides himself on his skill and detachment from his work, but a mysterious assignment to record an apparently innocuous conversation begins to threaten his carefully compartmentalised world — and maybe his life, too. Mirroring the opening moments, the story details his descent from impassive observer to unwilling participant at the mercy of his own subjective and fallible perceptions.
Like Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971), The Conversation uses thriller tropes to frame a complex character study, with both films driven by a desire to explore the psychology of their protagonists rather than by their outwardly conventional plots. The atmosphere of Coppola’s film is intimate to the point of claustrophobia, trapping us within Harry’s lonely perspective and denying us the release of any objective overview. The tone is pensive and subdued, belying the director’s taste for operatic scale defined by The Godfather (1972) and solidified by later works from Apocalypse Now (1979) to One from the Heart (1982) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Aided by Bill Butler’s muted cinematography, Walter Murch’s extraordinary sonic manipulations, and the sparse pirouettes of David Shire’s piano score, Coppola creates a choking sense of solitude and impending disaster.
The story’s holocaust may be small, but it attains crushing weight thanks to Hackman’s withdrawn but compelling lead performance. He moves through the film like a wounded animal, creeping clumsily across the screen as though terrified of receiving further injury. His dialogue is intentionally stilted and his voice faltering, a man torn between his need to relinquish his personal burdens and his obsessive desire for privacy. He seems infected by his covert work, intent on prying into the world of others while warding off even the most benevolent attempts to breach his own isolation.
Harry’s compulsion to conceal is so pronounced that an unsolicited birthday gift from his landlady prompts him to redirect his mail and demand she surrender her spare key to his rooms. Rather than celebrate his anniversary with friends, he stays alone in his apartment playing saxophone along to jazz records. The music appears to be his only outlet (and is the only thing left to him by the desolate climax) but characteristically, his performances are utterly solitary. They involve no genuine human interaction beyond the pre-recorded applause that greets Harry at the end of his secretive solos.
Harry shares his surname “Caul” with a noun describing the protective membrane that surrounds a foetus, an idea echoed by the translucent raincoat he wears in all weathers like a second skin, as if to shield himself from the world. Even when he visits his tentative girlfriend/tenant Amy (Teri Garr), he doesn’t remove his suit and tie, climbing onto the bed fully clothed as if unwilling to shed his tightly buttoned-up exterior. Their abortive encounter ends with Amy sadly declining to see Harry again, after he bristles at her “personal questions.” In reality, her queries are more than reasonable — what he does for a living, where he lives — but such is his fundamental unease with himself that he interprets her curiosity as an attack. We later find out how much this confrontation has hurt him when he tries to ask relative stranger Meredith (Elizabeth MacRae) for advice on Amy’s words. In a sign that his unendurable repression is now seriously undermining his judgment, he trusts the anonymity of their chance acquaintance over the risk of real emotional intimacy with Amy, paying the price for his poor choice when Meredith steals his tapes.
Harry’s paranoia is eventually revealed to stem in part from a previous surveillance job that caused the murder of innocent people. Although he claims to have no interest in the results of his work, his haunted conduct suggests otherwise. When he refutes responsibility, saying “It had nothing to do with me…I just turned in the tapes,” his voice is unconvincingly glib. Harry is a brilliant technician, evidenced by the barely concealed envy of his duplicitous rival Bernie (Allen Garfield) and the frustrated admiration of his colleague Stan (John Cazale). But he cannot enjoy being at the top of his profession; he can’t laugh off his concerns like Stan, or embrace the sleazily amoral salesmanship of Bernie. He maintains a faltering Catholic faith, attending confession and numbering a small figurine of the Virgin Mary among his meagre possessions. His concealed longing to be redeemed for past “sins” eventually leads him to intervene in his latest assignment — but it remains ambiguous whether his attempt to take responsibility results from real external danger, or from his own unhinged guilt.
Coppola deliberately hints at potential violence throughout the film. The directional microphones used to eavesdrop in the opening scene resemble rifles, right down to their telescopic sights, as if Harry’s business were assassination rather than surveillance. Unsettling visual compositions fill the San Francisco locations with menace, from the modernist offices of The Director (Robert Duvall) to the cavernous, half-empty loft that houses Harry’s technical equipment. The Director’s assistant Martin Stett (Harrison Ford) projects amused hostility towards Hackman’s lonely lead, stalking and mocking him with menacing insinuations.
However, none of these apparent threats are ever definitively confirmed. From his first confrontation with Stett onwards, Harry’s perceptions become increasingly unreliable — and as we are trapped within his point of view, that means that ours do, too. His first descent from The Director’s office is a masterclass in creating discomfort and paranoia: Murch subtly manipulates the mechanical sounds of the elevator while mixing them with Shire’s anxious score, while Butler’s camera conjures a suffocating sense of enclosure. Yet nothing explicitly sinister actually happens in the sequence, beyond the imagination of Harry and the viewer.
The sound bleeds directly into the next scene, with the elevator’s whine morphing into the whir of Harry’s tapes back at his loft. It’s at this already disturbed point that he finds the “evidence” in the recorded conversation that may suggest murder. In a brilliant touch, the key phrase, “He’d kill us if he had the chance,” is at first completely buried in feedback; we only hear it once Harry has electronically altered the recording. This begs the question: is what we hear accurate, or are we only witnessing what he thinks is there? Although Meredith and The Director also listen to the tape, neither visibly reacts to that particular line, failing to confirm or deny its existence. Each time Harry returns to the titular conversation, the angles we see it from and the sounds we hear shift subtly, constantly undermining what we thought we already knew.
The final twist reveals a completely different vocal emphasis in the incriminating sentence that entirely changes its meaning. This change is impossible — unless everything we’ve seen and heard has been subjective. Even this revelation refuses to be conclusive: the “murder” Harry sees draws directly on imaginary visions glimpsed in his earlier nightmares, and nobody else verifies the bloody evidence he appears to find at the hotel. Perhaps there was no murder, only a coincidental traffic accident? If so, perhaps Harry can’t find the bug Stett has apparently placed in his apartment because there isn’t one — after all, the only witnesses to Stett’s phone call are Harry and ourselves, and it’s now established that neither of us is reliable. Recalling Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), the film that inspired Coppola’s initial script, we are left entirely unmoored, unable to trust the protagonist or our own senses.
By chance, The Conversation’s release in 1974 coincided with the ongoing fallout from the real-life Watergate scandal, adding an unanticipated topicality to its surveillance theme. Although less explicitly political than contemporaries such as Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975) or Alan J. Pakula’s recreation of the investigation that led to Richard Nixon’s downfall in All the President’s Men (1976), Coppola’s film taps into a rich vein of paranoia that ran through several 1970s thrillers and still reverberates today. Like Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) in Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974), Harry tangles with a shadowy corporation and loses; as in Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975), Hackman plays a character who singularly fails to interpret the mysterious events around him correctly. Its veiled threat of assassination chimes with the more direct likes of David Miller’s Executive Action (1973) and William Richert’s Winter Kills (1979), which in turn lead back to classics from the previous decade such as John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962).
While the technology of The Conversation may be dated, its core concerns are not. Harry’s desire for privacy could barely be more relevant in an age where companies harvest our data and few public places are without surveillance equipment of some kind. His efforts to unravel the truth from a storm of distortion could easily be applied to our daily lives, caught between deliberate misinformation from prominent elements in politics and the media, and online conspiracy theorists with agendas of their own. Maybe we’re all Harry Caul now, spied on everywhere and struggling to understand the fragmented world around us, and how best to take responsibility for its mess. On its original release, Coppola described The Conversation as “a modern horror film.” Fifty years on, it remains haunting, powerful, and disturbingly contemporary.
