The
Conversation
a film by Francis Ford
Coppola released through Paramount Pcitures in 1974
Harry Caul is an atypical screen protagonist, a
shabbily-attired brilliant loner who says little, lacks courage, and despite a
strictly maintained, amoral dispassion about his work, feels guilty about its
consequences. All through The Conversation he invests in the high
technology that has brought him quiet fame while the people he shares a parcel
of his life with suffer his brutal silence and bitter scorn. Indeed, his is a life fully dedicated to the
job, asking only for the privacy he so often denies others, now finally denied
him. Pitted against a two-faced enemy
who cares even less about morality than Caul does, the fake-safe life he's
built for himself gives way too fast for him to notice that his destruction was
self-ordained.
Years
of labor in a crumbling studio system were a boon to Francis Ford Coppola’s
career, but left him exasperated and guilt-ridden. Despite his many successes (including an
Oscar for Patton) he still hungered
to make intimate art-house cinema, and was afraid one day he would really
sell-out, no longer working with the Establishment, but becoming part of
it. Struggling with the burdensome debt
of his under-achieving production venture American Zoetrope, Coppola accepted
the job of directing Paramount’s The
Godfather, initially conceived as a modest gangster film.
As
a result, Coppola finally had the chance to make The Conversation. Flush with
the profits generated by history’s biggest box-office hit, the power was his to
make whatever he chose: “I…want to make
a film that tops [The Godfather] as a
really moving human document. It’s like
some music I hear once in a while. I
hear it and I think, ‘Why can’t I make a film that feels like that?’ That’s what I’m going to try to do.”
Coppola
wanted to make, in his words, a “Hitchcockian horror film” that went further
than the thrillers of the past by focusing more on performance than
design. A strong influence here was
French director Henri-Georges Clouzot.
For
material, Coppola returned to an idea that had been germinating in his mind
since a 1966 conversation with director Irvin Kershner about surveillance. Kershner observed that a confidential matter
is best discussed in a milling crowd.
Slowly a story emerged dealing with the stinging conscience of a man
long hidden by the anonymous reach of high technology; he must confront a sad
legacy as he deals with the most demanding job of his career.
The
first shot of the film reflects its artistic ambitions. High above Union Square, San Francisco, our
perspective ever-so-slowly narrows on the denizens below, eventually finding
Harry Caul and two unsettled objects of surveillance, much like the forced
voyeurism inaugurating Psycho. In this scene Coppola tries a new approach to
character delineation where instead of divulging background and traits,
dropping clues as a playwright would, he relies on a single fragmented
conversation in a busy lunchtime crowd.
The director comments that movies “are all made the same way and the
reason they’re made the same way is because the audiences want them that
way. The films cost so much that to
really veer from that way of telling a story you have to be independently
wealthy to subsidize it.”
The
production budget was set for $2 million, quite sufficient for a film with few
special effects or big stars. However,
the shoot was never smooth. Early on,
cinematographer Haskell Wexler fought with Dean Tavoularis, the production
designer. Coppola supported Tavoularis
and Wexler had to leave. Bill Butler,
who had worked on Coppola’s The Rain
People, stepped in behind the camera.
Around the same time, actor Timothy Carey didn’t work out and production
was shut down until Alan Garfield could replace him in the role of big-talker
Bernie Moran.
As
shooting began to wind down, and with his thoughts turning to pre-production on
The Godfather Part II, Coppola gave
the film to a brilliant young filmmaker, University of Southern California
graduate Walter Murch. He was instructed
to supervise the edit and handle the mix—make the big artistic decisions and
the two of the them would sort it out once Coppola could return to the project. It was a long one—shooting began in the fall
of 1972 and the film wasn’t released until April of 1974.
Walter
Murch’s incredible facility with sound can be observed many times over,
haunting and perplexing the audience as tapes are played and overlaid
throughout the film, with The Conversation the only source for the truth. Still, his most important contribution lay in
a simple decision in the cutting room, delaying Caul’s discovery of a critical
exchange in the surveillance recording until after his first dealings with the
enigmatic executive assistant played by Harrison Ford.
Composer
David Shire was another crew member given atypical control. He began work on the film before it was shot,
even attending a read-through of the script.
Coppola gave him subjects to write on, each of which was only
tangentially related to the film’s story.
Shire said, “He gave me these funny titles like, ‘Harry Picks Up His
Laundry’; ‘Harry Goes to Thanksgiving Dinner at His Grandmother’s; ‘Harry Goes
to His High School Reunion.’
“So
I wrote a bunch of pieces, and one of them had a melody in it which I kind of
liked, and which Francis was intrigued by, and he said, ‘Let’s develop that
some more.’ And that became the theme
for The Conversation.”
The
artistic success of this film (it secured the top prize at the Cannes Film
Festival) is a direct result of the intense personal felling Coppola invested
in the project. Like Harry Caul he was
an electronics whiz who migrated to San
Francisco. Coppola’s childhood struggles
with polio are voiced by the protagonist in a rare moment of self-revelation in
the film. And the buried guilt of Roman
Catholicism felt by the director is also given expression.
In
every scene of the film, Harry Caul is there.
We see the film entirely through his eyes and are granted no information
apart from what he knows. As a result,
distinguishing the facts from the fantasy can be rather difficult. For example, we never can really tell what
happened in the hotel murder. First
there is a premonition, then the murder (off-screen), followed by Harry's
search of the room, and a later sequence where we see either what really
happened, or what Harry assumes happened.
As a result of these myriad perspectives on the crime, the audience is
left strangely perplexed, especially on the initial viewing. And this is just how Harry feels—stunned and
adrift.
Regarding
the critical line of dialogue, "He'd kill us if he got the chance,"
are we hearing the tape or are we hearing Harry's impression of the tape? Does Mark ever emphasize the word 'us' at
all? We never know; we are forced to
identify with Harry—we sink or swim with him.
The Conversation supports many themes,
many meanings. Harry Caul is a broken
soul looking for love, expecting others to just give and give without expecting
anything in return. With Amy he refuses
to divulge any details of his life, despite her obvious affections for
him. With Stan, he will not share any of
the technology he's developed, won't collaborate with his subordinate to make
new equipment. He chastises him for a
disappointing recording that Stan couldn't have made better just by monitoring
more closely what each unit was picking up.
Still, he wants Stan to obey his dictums, not asking any questions.
Caul,
in addition to seeking love, also seeks a clear conscience. As best he can, he expunges the memory of the
disastrous welfare fund job, concurrently endeavoring to unravel the latest
mess he finds himself in. He seeks to
forestall further death and thus counteract the guilt he steadfastly
denies. In the workshop party scene,
with cages and opaque screens serving as visual reinforcement, Caul dismisses
any moral culpability for past work.
Similarly, in the church, as Caul struggles to discuss anything but the
job that prompted his confession, the image blurs. This can be interpreted (in conjunction with
the shift of Caul's voice) to mean that he never spoke of his fear, confusion,
and guilt to the priest; we're hearing what he would say should he summon his
courage and overcome his pathologically insular nature.
Returning to the inventive David Shire
score, the composer was reluctant to embrace Coppola’s concept of an
exclusively piano score. They arrived at
a satisfying compromise, where piano is the dominant instrument. In two scenes, a dream sequence and the hotel
murder, synthetic elements are used to great effect, the first for atmosphere,
the second for terror.
Shire uses approximately four motives
throughout the score. Much of the music
is based on semitone stepwise movement and dissonant diads from which notes
spring away. The textures are thin and
fluid—chords are often implied rather than objectively stated, and with the
harmonies primarily modal or outright abstract, the music is elusive,
intriguing. Depending on the scene, the
same music can express boredom or danger.
In dialogue scenes, Shire keeps the motion of the left hand part going,
inconspicuously, while the right hand waits for a lull in the exchange; it is smooth,
unobtrusive scoring that hits the mark, perfectly capturing the emotions Harry
locks away from others. And as Harry
becomes more deeply involved in corporate intrigue and duplicity, the piano
becomes distorted, filtered, far away.
The piano has something of a brittle
sound and, played solo, it reflects Harry's lonely life. In addition, as he is a jazzman, it is an
instrument with which he can readily identify.
A most unusual scoring situation occurs
at the film's end. Harry, alone in his
smashed apartment, plays his saxophone, and the music Shire brings in gives us
a strange duet, a mixture of source and score of a type little heard in films
before.
The
conclusive scenes of the film leave us with many unanswered questions. We know Mystery Corp. has a full dossier on
Caul, and if they're able to unearth his telephone number, they likely possess
the wherewithal to plant a bug as well.
(If the landlady can get in, they probably can, too.) Yet, the idea of a conspiracy between Martin
Stett and the murderous adulterers does not go far enough. To really tie the story together, William
Moran, the jealous, arrogant, spiteful bugger, should help in this conspiracy
to kill.
The
key to understanding what happens at the film's end may come an hour earlier,
at the surveillance convention. At one
booth a disengaged man recites the advantages of the Spectre automatic recorder
actuator. Caul seems pretty
intrigued. He asks if it is anything
like the Moran actuator. The Spectre man
maintains that Moran copied him, and that he "won't even let him smell my
equipment any more." Minutes later,
in a fleeting aside to Paulie, the cop, Moran is more than intrigued—he claims
they stole his invention. In Moran's demonstration at the convention,
he states that the Moran S15 Harmonica Pack cannot be detected on the line
because it has its own nickel-cadmium power source. (Indeed, at the film’s conclusion, Caul finds
nothing when he searches his phone.)
The
difference between the two actuators is that the Spectre actuator only begins monitoring
when the telephone receiver is lifted, shutting off once it is returned to the
cradle, while the Moran actuator is triggered by a harmonica tone played in the
course of dialing. Neither seems to fit
the circumstances in which we find Caul at the film's conclusion. He answers the phone once, hangs up, responds
to the next ringing, and hears a recording made seconds earlier. So is Spectre copying Moran, or is Moran appropriating
a more advanced Spectre concept as his own, but keeping it off the market for
his own surveillance use?
The
key to duping Caul with the telephone is to not have any physical object in the
phone. What they want is an electric
signal sent through the phone line that engages the receiver even as it rests
on the cradle. Thus, Stett could get his
recording, while Caul is left helpless, finding nothing of evidence.
And that's it for Caul. As through a security camera panning back and forth we witness the sorry end of this compelling story, the sad destruction of the apartment reflecting the inner unrest and devastation of the film's protagonist. He has been undone by the very beast he helped create, and we are left with the sad sense that one man's forever threadbare life just unraveled to its end.
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