Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, an overlooked masterpiece of bleak mid-1970s film-making, is one of those quiet, contemplative little movies, almost an art house production, that the big studios used to bankroll back in the old days, before everything became about spaceships and superheroes in skin-tight outfits battling with CGI aliens and monsters (though upon its release, the first Superman movie was just four years over the horizon, and Star Wars would be along in only three to usher in the era of special effects comic book movies designed as much to sell toys as tell a compelling story). A pure product of its paranoid, depressive, post-Watergate era, it’s of a piece with films like The Parallax View, Chinatown, Three Days of the Condor, Network, and Klute, movies about ambiguity, amorality, corruption, dark forces pulling the strings from behind the scenes, and not-so-happy endings; it’s also a lot like Antonioni’s head-twisting Sixties tour de force Blow-Up, which likewise examined the sometimes misleading subjectivity of perception, and the elusiveness of truth.
The great Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a sound surveillance expert famous in the community for being able to bug anybody, anywhere, no matter how difficult the conditions. He’s been tasked with recording a conversation between a pair of lovers as they walk in circles around a noisy public plaza, an almost impossible assignment that he pulls off with the use of multiple microphones deployed by a number of operatives stationed in and around the area, one pointed from atop a billboard, another out of a high window, another being carried in a shopping bag, and so on, each capturing a piece of the dialog, as depicted in the first attachment. It’s one of the most immediately gripping opening sequences ever filmed; straight away, without any sort of preliminary exposition, the viewer is placed right in the middle of the crucial moment upon which everything’s going to turn (readers of a certain age may recognize Robert Shields, of the soon-to-be-famous mime team Shields & Yarnell, performing some street theatre in the plaza before Hackman enters the picture). In the second scene, Harry puts it all together, synthesizing the tapes to form a single seamless recording in a fascinating demonstration of technical mastery, in this case with sound equipment, that’s highly reminiscent of the process by which professional photographer David Hemmings, the protagonist in Blow-Up, works with imagery as he makes successive enlargements of an enigmatic set of shots of a couple he took in a park, trying to get to the bottom of what he thinks he might have captured on film (I love how you can hear the wind blowing through the leaves as Hemmings stares intently at the increasingly indistinct imagery):
Both men reach the troubling conclusion that they’ve gathered evidence of murder plots, and in both cases that evidence is stolen by unknown thieves, leaving them nothing they might take to the authorities, and uncertain about what they might have been on the cusp of proving. In Blow-Up, we’re left to wonder what really happened, finally, and even whether Hemmings really captured a murder in progress after all (he discovered a body, but it vanished too – was it all an illusion?), while The Conversation ends with the realization that somebody was murdered, all right, but not the ones Harry took to be the intended victims. He’d gotten it all wrong, all because of his mis-hearing of a haunting, unforgettable nuance of verbal emphasis that nobody who’s seen the movie can ever forget: “He’d kill us if he had the chance”.
the needlefish 