One of those movies that, for whatever reason, I had never seen straight through from start to finish was The Conversation. So the last time TCM ran it -- not as part of the programming tribute to star Gene Hackman -- I recorded it and finally got around to watching it and writing up this post on the movie.
The film starts off with an extended sequence of a young couple, Ann and Mark (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest), meeting for lunch in San Francisco's Union Park, a busy place there are there are all sorts of people talking to each other and doing stuff. This is intercut with images of what looks like it could be a sniper on a balcony overlooking the park, as well as an older guy with a hearing aid who eventually unnerves Ann enough to make a comment that she thinks he's following them. And indeed, they are being watched, as the action pulls out to a van. In the van, supervising things, is Harry Caul (Gene Hackman). He's a surveillance expert, who has been contacted by Martin Stett (Harrison Ford), the executive assistant to the "Director" (Robert Duvall) of a large concern of some sort, to follow this couple for reasons not made clear to Harry and his staff.
Harry would prefer to work alone, as he's understandably a bit of a paranoiac considering the occupation he's in. But since a lot of the jobs require multiple sorts of expertise and people being eyes and ears from more than one location, he works with people like Stan (John Cazale) on this job, although Stan begins to get on Harry's nerves and ultimately takes a job with a competitor. Harry has an uneasy relationship with his girlfried who doesn't know what he really does for a living. And when Harry has a social function with some people he meets at a professional conference for the surveillance industry, he decidedly doesn't want to talk about how he got the information in a previous case back in New York in the late 1960s. This especially because that job resulted in a couple of deaths.
A major portion of the current job involves listening to the conversation Ann and Mark had in the park, which contains a bunch of seemingly innocuous stuff, as well as one passage that resulted in distortion, making it sound garbled. But this is where Harry's expertise comes in. He works on that tape and is somehow able to resolve the garbling and distortion, to the point where he can finally clear up that missing passage: "He'd kill us if he got the chance."
So Harry is naturally uncomfortable, since the implication is that the couple is in fear for their lives, and Harry doesn't want to be responsible for more deaths. He attempts to investigate further, and, hearing a particular hotel room mentioned, tries to find out what might be about to go on in that hotel room. Meanwhile, at that party following the surveillance convention, Harry realizes that his tapes have been stolen. This, as you might guess, only makes Harry more paranoid.
Now, I'm not certain quite how realistic The Conversation is, mostly because I don't know if it would have been physically possible to clear up that distortion on the original tapes even with the audio technology of today, never mind what they had in the early 1970s. There are some other plot holes around whether characters in the real world would have had the wherewithal to do some of the things they do, but I don't want to go into more detail in that regard since it would give away key plot points in the second half of the movie. In any case, The Conversation is as much a character study of the Harry Caul character as it is about what's going on in the actual conversation he's been asked to record. In that regard, The Conversation works extremely well, thanks to a very strong (and surprisingly not Oscar-nominated) performance from Gene Hackman. The supporting cast also does a fine job, and the general atmosphere of the film is consistently off-kilter, which I think it needs to be for a movie like this that's ultimately about paranoia.
If you haven't seen The Conversation before, you really should. It's a fine movie that stands the test of time fifty-plus years later.
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