Saturday Night Cinema: The Conversation

Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema classic is Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, starring Oscar winner Gene Hackman. This tense, paranoid thriller presents Francis Ford Coppola at his finest — and makes some remarkably advanced arguments about technology’s role in society that still resonate today.

The Conversation, it’s called, and it’s a volcano of a movie, an absolute sensation. I liked it better even than The Godfather… The fun of seeing it for the first time is all yours and I envy you.

Bernard Drew
Gannett News Service

Story continues below advertisement

Made between The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), and in part a homage to Michelangelo Antonioni’s art-movie classic Blow-Up (1966), The Conversation was a return to small-scale art films for Francis Ford Coppola.

Sound surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is hired to track a young couple (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest), taping their conversation as they walk through San Francisco’s crowded Union Square.

Knowing full well how technology can invade privacy, Harry obsessively keeps to himself, separating business from his personal life, even refusing to discuss what he does or where he lives with his girlfriend, Amy (Teri Garr).

Harry’s work starts to trouble him, however, as he comes to believe that the conversation he pieced together reveals a plot by the mysterious corporate “Director” who hired him to murder the couple.

After he allows himself to be seduced by a call girl, who then steals the tapes, Harry is all the more convinced that a killing will occur, and he can no longer separate his job from his conscience.

Coppola, cinematographer Bill Butler, and Oscar-nominated sound editor Walter Murch convey the narrative through Harry’s aural and visual experience, beginning with the slow opening zoom of Union Square accompanied by the alternately muddled and clear sound of the couple’s conversation caught by Harry’s microphones.

The Godfather Part II and The Conversation earned Coppola a rare pair of Oscar nominations for Best Picture, as well as two nominations for Best Screenplay (The Godfather Part II won both).

Praised by critics, The Conversation was not a popular hit, but it has since come to be seen as one of the artistic high points of the decade, as well as of Coppola’s career.

Its atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion, combined with its obsessive loner antihero, made it prototypical of the darker “American art movies” of the early ’70s, as its audiotape storyline also made it seem eerily appropriate for the era of the Watergate scandal. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi

The Truth Must be Told

Your contribution supports independent journalism

Please take a moment to consider this. Now, more than ever, people are reading Geller Report for news they won't get anywhere else. But advertising revenues have all but disappeared. Google Adsense is the online advertising monopoly and they have banned us. Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have blocked and shadow-banned our accounts. But we won't put up a paywall. Because never has the free world needed independent journalism more.

Everyone who reads our reporting knows the Geller Report covers the news the media won't. We cannot do our ground-breaking report without your support. We must continue to report on the global jihad and the left's war on freedom. Our readers’ contributions make that possible.

Geller Report's independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our work is critical in the fight for freedom and because it is your fight, too.

Please contribute here.

or

Make a monthly commitment to support The Geller Report – choose the option that suits you best.

• $25.00 here
• $50.00 here
• $75.00 here
• $100.00 here
• $250.00 here

0 0 votes

Article Rating

7 Comments

Oldest

Newest Most Voted

Inline Feedbacks

View all comments

DemocracyRules

4 years ago

Thanks Pamela!

0

CanadaGoose1

4 years ago

I found it very boring. I much prefer the Life of Others about living under the communist rule in East Berlin where you could trust no one.

0

felix1999

4 years ago

Reply to  CanadaGoose1

I had never heard of this movie before.
The Life of Others should be required viewing.

0

CanadaGoose1

4 years ago

Reply to  felix1999

Barbara is another good film about life in Eastern Germany. A doctor finds herself banished to a small country hospital.

0

Marek

4 years ago

Statistically evident: (not only) political stupidity is female. As if it wasn’t commonplace since ancient times that women’s heads are more suitable for combing hair than for “thinking & making decisions”! https://voiceofeurope.com/2020/03/study-women-more-likely-to-vote-for-parties-that-celebrities-friends-and-mass-culture-approve-of/

0

Kwitcherbellyakin

4 years ago

This was a ery good movie and as the character developed, he became more human. By the end, he was reduced to paranoia. The movie stuck with me, especially the ending.
I have not seen this movie in re-runs, but if It becomes available, I will watch it again.

0

MuhamMUDTheFakeProphet

4 years ago

Considering the kind of surveillance technology they had back then you have to wonder what they have now. The NSA probably has my comments on file before I even make them.

0