If you're up for some late night 1970s paranoia then check out The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola's conspiracy thriller classic. The plot is pretty straightforward. A man and a woman take a stroll in their lunch break around Union Square in San Francisco. They talk about everyday things - Christmas presents, tramps on park benches, when they are next going to meet... perhaps they are having an affair, so what? It all seems quite ordinary, yet someone wants to have their conversation recorded. And they've asked surveillance expert Harry Caul, "the best bugger on the West coast" to do it. When Harry hears a snippet of the conversation that he thinks might endanger the lives of the couple he takes measures to protect them, forcing him to question his own very strong personal values and putting his life in danger.
From this simple premise Coppola weaves themes of mistrust, paranoia and the power of the establishment to invade people's most private moments. Top acting honours go to Gene Hackman who stars as the anonymous Harry Caul. With a grey translucent raincoat, a pair of rimless specs and a truly awful 'tash as his only props, Hackman paints a picture of a very private and insecure man with no friends and no life outside his work. His only releases from his job are playing the saxophone in his drab apartment and confessing his sins to the local priest. It's a very selfless underplayed portrayal of a nobody, a million miles away from Popeye Doyle, and it underlines what a brilliant actor Hackman is. Look out too for a very young and menacing Harrison Ford and the uncredited Robert Duval as the mysterious "Director".
The other star of the show is Walter Murch's sound mixing. It's not often that sound mixing plays so prominently in a movie, but here it should share equal billing with the actors and the director. The scenes of Hackman cutting, splicing, tweaking and fine tuning the recording sit right at the heart of the movie. The sound of tapes rewinding and playing back over and over until the conversation is 100% clear are quite hypnotic and fascinating. It's almost as though we are watching a lesson in how to record sound for the cinema.
Francis Ford Coppola made The Conversation in between his first two Godfather films. That's a pretty amazing feat - sandwiched between two of the most acclaimed epics in movie history we have a beautifully crafted and personal film about the mood of the country in the post Vietnam years and amidst the lies and deceit of Nixon's presidency. Remarkably, The Conversation was conceived and shot before Watergate broke, and the political scandal casts a large shadow over the film. Coppola has even gone on record to say how amazed he was that the equipment used by Harry in the film was previously used by the Nixon administration for surveillance.
There's a heavy influence in the movie from Antonioni's Blow Up, which does the same thing for photography as The Conversation does for sound. In turn, Brian de Palma took chunks of The Conversation's themes and plot for his 1981 film Blow Out about a sound recorder trying to uncover a political assassination. And Hackman resurrected Harry Caul in Tony Scott's late 90s thriller Enemy of The Sate, albeit under a different name although the two characters are almost identical.
The Conversation itself sits in good company alongside other 70s conspiracy movies such as The Parallax View, Klute and Three Days of The Condor. However none of these films have either the depth of character or the simplicity of The Conversation. It's brilliant movie which leaves the late night viewer with food for thought long after the end credits have rolled.
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