By Todd Garbarini
The Conversation (1974), the best film that Francis Ford Coppola has ever
made, begins with a bird's-eye view of a crowd of people in San Francisco's
Union Square. The camera slowly and
decisively zeroes in on specific people moving about, such as a mime (Robert
Shields of the “Shields and Yarnell†television show from 1977-1978 and one of
the world's greatest mimes) and eventually rests on our protagonist, Harry
Caul, a wire tapper and surveillance expert played by Gene Hackman in one of
his best screen performances. From the
film's very first frame, this is a movie about seeing and listening without
being detected. It's also about deeper
issues such as guilt, paranoia, responsibility, absolution and redemption,
themes that were common to American cinema in the 1970's during the Watergate
scandal and the Vietnam era. What is
even more amazing is the fact that The
Conversation is a film that most contemporary audiences have never even heard
of.
Originally written in the 1960's, The Conversation was filmed in late 1972 and early 1973 in San
Francisco when the city was gripped by the Zodiac murders. It was released in the spring of 1974. The complete flip side of Jimmy
"Popeye" Doyle, another brilliant performance by Mr. Hackman in
William Friedkin's Oscar-winning The
French Connection (1971), Harry is a quiet, lonely, and deliberately
withdrawn man with literally no friends, no attachments, and no hobbies to
speak of, except playing his saxophone to his jazz records. His cinematic brethren would appear to be
Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's Taxi
Driver (1976) and Jimmy Angelleli in James Toback's Fingers (1978), both masterful studies of troubled individuals. Many films during the 1970s dealt with
withdrawn middle-aged men, but Harry wants
to be alone. Even his brief interlude
with his sometime girlfriend Amy, played wonderfully by Teri Garr, is awkward
and sad. He pays her rent, lies to her
about his age and what he does for a living, and is made uncomfortable when she
asks him simple questions about his life. David Shire, Mr. Coppola’s former brother-in-law, provides a brilliantly
quiet piano score that enunciates Harry’s aloof nature.
