Critic’s Notebook: On Its 50th Anniversary, Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’ Offers a Searing Vision of Then, and Now

Two years after he leapt to the forefront of the New Hollywood with The Godfather, and just months before he picked up the threads of that operatic crime saga with the magnificent sequel/prequel The Godfather Part II, Francis Ford Coppola released a quiet movie, one in which sound itself — and, more specifically, its surreptitious recording — is the narrative engine. Arriving during a particularly fertile era for American film, The Conversation was not a hit, but it is one of the period’s most subtle and shattering features. Half a century later, it resounds as hauntingly as ever, not merely as a cautionary tale but as a searing portrait of where we are now.

The movie took its New York bow on Coppola’s 35th birthday, April 7, 1974, a few weeks before its Palme d’Or triumph in Cannes. Today the octogenarian writer-director is again preparing to compete on the Croisette, this time with his decades-in-the-making Megalopolis, an eon-spanning epic that’s raising alarms over commercial viability. But whatever the qualms about Coppola’s latest, and perhaps final, passion project, no one should be surprised that it leans toward the outré; experimentation courses through his filmography, from the neon theatricality of One From the Heart (a beautiful flop) to the open-ended darkness of Apocalypse Now (which reaped his second Palme) to the meditative fantasy of Youth Without Youth (widely panned).

If Coppola hasn’t maintained the box office muscle of his slightly younger contemporaries Spielberg and Scorsese, it’s in part because he’s gone out, sometimes way out, on moviemaking limbs. But he hasn’t always gone big; The Conversation is as restrained and unadorned as it is intricately crafted.

It has the taut skin of a thriller, but The Conversation is, heart and soul, an art film, a finely tuned layering of sensory immersion, suspense and dread. Coppola took inspiration from Blowup, the 1966 English-language bow of Michelangelo Antonioni, the incomparable cinema poet of existential angst, who in turn was inspired by a 1959 short story by the influential postmodernist Julio Cortázar. Blowup and its source material spin around the philosophical mystery of photography, and the question of whether recorded images can take us to the truth of a story — whether they are indeed incontestable documentation or as open to interpretation as anything we don’t experience firsthand. Cortázar’s protagonist, suspecting that his snapshots reveal a sordid encounter, ponders what it means “to be only the lens of my camera, something fixed, rigid, incapable of intervention.”

Coppola shifted that question from the visual to the aural: His central character, Harry Caul, is what another figure in the story calls “the best bugger on the West Coast,” though Harry prefers the more careerist terminology “surveillance and security technician.” In 1981, Brian De Palma would maintain the aural angle in Blow Out, his grittier spin on the Antonioni film, with John Travolta as a sound designer on crappy slasher movies who finds himself with a recording that he’s certain is proof of murder.

Occupying a realm between the trippy hothouse vibe of Blowup and the thriller machinations of De Palma, Coppola’s take is a sublime distillation. Its cast of ’70s luminaries includes John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Teri Garr, Harrison Ford and Robert Duvall, led by an exquisite, muffled gut punch of a performance from Gene Hackman as the tightly contained surveillance whiz.

Harry is in the midst of a particularly challenging assignment, recording a couple (Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams, in a very different mode from the kooky cutie-pie she would soon become on Laverne & Shirley) as they move through the lunchtime hubbub of a public park, San Francisco’s Union Square. “I don’t care what they’re talking about,” Harry, struggling to separate their words from the midday noise, tells his sole employee (Cazale, in the second entry on his stellar, heartbreakingly short five-movie filmography). But Harry’s professed agnosticism toward his work begins to fray when his tapes suggest that the people he’s bugged are being targeted for murder by his client.

He’s a genius at invading people’s privacy, but between his massive case of Catholic repression and the secrecy of his work, intimacy is a foreign language for Harry. Hackman’s scenes with Garr and Elizabeth MacRae, as women Harry sleeps with, are breathtaking explorations of the uneasy dance between seduction and disconnection. As Harry Caul’s surname suggests, there’s something newborn and blank about him, an idea that’s echoed in the strange, membrane-like translucency of his raincoat.

Perhaps the film character he has most in common with is Alain Delon’s hitman in Le Samouraï, a 1967 gem from Jean-Pierre Melville that was recently restored and rereleased. Stylistically, they’re worlds apart, one a figure of icy underworld glamour, the other what you might call an anti-hepcat. But they’re both loners who live in sparsely furnished monastic apartments and go elsewhere for sex. They’re mercenaries who pride themselves on their expertise. And their amoral devotion to unlawful work has brought each of them, unexpectedly, to a place of uncertainty.

Delon’s character uses a ring of keys to steal cars. The cops have one too, but they also have an ultra-sophisticated system involving, you guessed it, gallium arsenide transmitters. To us denizens of the digital age, the state-of-the-art eavesdropping technologies in these movies, with their dials and levers and reel-to-reel tapes, look quaint bordering on otherworldly. (But perhaps the most striking difference between then and now: In both The Conversation and Blow Out, public phones booths a) exist and b) are considered secure means of communication.)

At the time of its release, the resonance between The Conversation’s tech and the Watergate break-in was unmistakable but unintended; Coppola wrote the screenplay before the White House Plumbers’ malfeasance became front-page news. Party politics is not the point, anyway — then or now. Rather, it’s the chilling suggestion that when it comes to high-tech monitoring, we’re all vulnerable. As Neil Postman put it in his brilliant 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, referring to George Orwell’s worldview: “It makes little difference if our wardens are inspired by right- or left-wing ideologies. The gates of the prison are equally impenetrable, surveillance equally rigorous, icon-worship equally pervasive.” Today, freelance snoops like Harry have given way to an increasingly centralized spy machinery, an unholy marriage of government and big business.

Antonioni’s Blowup is steeped in the sex and style of Swinging London, the mingling of high and low in a class-conscious society. In Coppola’s more overtly sinister, and distinctly American, vision, there is no such mingling. Harry’s client, known only as “the Director,” operates his empire from the upper floors of a skyscraper, a vantage providing vertiginous views of high-rise construction and foreshadowing an era of tech millionaires and Silicon Valley oligarchs.

It’s an era when we invite the watchers and listeners into our lives in the name of entertainment, social media, work communications and whatever Siri is. The manipulative wonder of deepfakes and the ever-quickening advance of AI are beyond Harry’s time frame and mandate, but it would take a blindness as willful as his not to recognize the throughline from his dials and levers to the assumed convenience of our always-on connectivity.

For years Harry Caul has made it his business not to ask questions of the industrialists and politicos who seek his services. His thoughts begin with the goal of perfecting his espionage techniques, and end with the fat envelopes of cash he receives from rarefied quarters. The uses to which his raw material is applied have “nothing to do with me,” he insists. “I just turned in the tapes.”

Whether you call him a heartless entrepreneur, a victim of his own delusion or an unlikely Everyman, this indelibly drawn antihero, with his lonely jazz saxophone, his inflated sense of importance, and his mind ultimately as ransacked as his apartment, embodies the dangers of the surveillance age like no screen character before or since. Some warnings are better heard without shouting, as Coppola’s elegant and wrenching tour de force attests.