The Conversation
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The Conversation
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1995.
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The Conversation is a 1974 American neo-noir mystery thriller film written, produced, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr, and Robert Duvall. Hackman portrays a surveillance expert who faces a moral dilemma when his recordings reveal a potential murder.
Why It Rocks
- During its production and release time, the film was considered cheap due to not having a very high budget, to the point where it could nearly be considered a B-movie. And yet, despite this, it's a subtle, complex, stark piece of media that defies genre, frustrates narrative expectations, and challenges and sometimes alienates viewers. That's more than what can be said about the standard B-movie. This new kind of B-movie would catch on in subsequent decades: a cheaply made auteurist indulgence made to stroke a talented, independent-minded director’s ego in the gap between genuine money-making features.
- After the success of The Godfather, Coppola had more freedom to devote his time to a small-scale personal project. Despite The Godfather's success, the process of making the said film had struck Coppola as frustrating and demeaning, as he wasn't intending on making a big-budget film for a mass audience, adapting another writer’s best-selling potboiler, or working under the neurotic oversight of an oppressive corporate studio like Paramount. This film, on the other hand, allowed Coppola to showcase more of his talent and artistic vision.
- Gene Hackman's lead role as Harry Caul was "a depressing and difficult part to play" according to Hackman, since it was low-key. Caul is an intensely private individual who is also intensely proud of his profession in audio espionage. Although he resembles a private eye, Caul thinks that he can distance himself intellectually and emotionally from his work by planting bugs and recording surreptitious meetings. In the film, he encounters a situation that questions both his skills and his beliefs. This also makes the conspiracy thriller an effective character study that exposes the emerging conscience of an estranged eavesdropper whose work once resulted in the death of three people.
- The film's script was partially based on Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup, a thriller about a photographer who unwittingly records evidence of a crime, and it even includes homages to said film, with one scene in particular being nearly identical.
- Coppola may have been a fan of New Wave films, but he typically avoided copying European styles. This film has a genuine plot as well as something to say about society and culture, and at this stage of his career, the director was skilled enough to make his points in a clear, forceful manner. Remarkably prescient in its treatment of wiretapping, The Conversation is also one of the most visually and aurally seductive movies of its time, one whose layers of artistry continue to unfold with repeated viewings.
- Considering the film was written, produced and released before and during the Watergate era -- a time of heightened concern over the violation of civil liberties, its claustrophobic themes of the destruction of privacy, alienation, guilt, voyeurism, justified paranoia, unprincipled corporate power and personal responsibility effectively responded to growing, ominous 20th century threats of eavesdropping to personal liberties.
- Incredible sound work that even got the film a Oscar nomination for Best Sound for its effective sound-mixing of interdependent elements: taped conversations, muffled voices, background and other mechanically-generated noises, musical/piano accompaniment (Harry Caul's signature theme) and other ambient sounds.
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