Back in 1974, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation employed a soundtrack in such a creative and inventive way that the film acquired a greater vitality and expression of its themes and moods than had the filmmakers treated the movie as a conventional suspenser along the lines of 1998’s Enemy of the State, a film that imagines itself inspired by The Conversation which also starred Gene Hackman as a techno-geekish surveillance expert with a paranoid streak.

The sound including all its elements (dialogue recording, sound effects, music), enhances specific emotions and effects, illustrates distinctive qualities about the characters, and conveys sub-themes and concepts related to its overall major theme of trust in a world growing increasingly susceptible to invasion of privacy, the problematic issues of misinterpretation with progressively more information without fully intimate background knowledge, and the guilt that goes along with making a profession out of snooping on people that aren’t necessarily criminals.

The music soundtrack alone plays an important role. Much of the incidental music that plays while we observe Hackman’s Harry Caul consists of an unaccompanied piano playing a hauntingly lonely minor-key melody. This aura suits Caul well for he too is a lonely man, haunted by the guilt that his work was once used to harm innocent people: “I've been involved in some work that I think will be used to hurt these two young people. It's happened to me before. People were hurt because of my work, and I'm afraid it could happen again and I'm . . . I was in no way responsible. I'm not responsible. For these and all my sins of my past life, I am heartily sorry.”

In his apartment, Harry plays his saxophone along with a vinyl record. This further underscores his solitude, especially when the music on the record ends and he bows his head, alone in his thoughts while we hear the applause from the recording. It’s an interesting moment, an ambiguous one—is he bowing out of despair, or is there a hint of imagined bowing before the audience he fantasized listened to him play? Or both. Yes, he’s clearly a lonely man, but he does have an element of pride that he takes in his work evidenced by his chastising his partner Stan (John Cazale) for some sloppy work.

Ambiguity rears up time and again in the film, as when Harry listens through the hotel wall adjoining Mark and Ann (Frederick Forrest and Cindy Williams) hearing a checks into a hotel room next door to a rendezvous between Mark and Ann. Listening through the wall, he hears a skirmish and possibly a murder. Harry is terrified, but later when he enters the room, it shows no sign whatsoever of a struggle. But then in a harrowingly creepy scene when he flushes the toilet, it overflows with bright red blood. Is this proof indeed of mayhem or rather Harry’s own imagined guilt/paranoia creating the sight in his head?

And one of the key ambiguities in the film is the essential titular conversation itself. Harry Caul’s troubles start up in the film after he and his team have recorded a conversation between Mark and Ann, whom a corporate executive (Robert Duvall) suspects as having an affair. Is the crucial line spoken as: “He’d kill us if he had the chance” or is it, “He’d kill us if he had the chance”? The meaning varies greatly, and is even recited differently upon successive hearings. Some might call this a cheat, but it is in my opinion a very effective way of indicating the meaning one can impose on a piece of information depending on one’s psychological state of mind at the time. I can’t think of another film that was ever made that hinges its plot so crucially on the simple sound emphasis on two little words.

During the scenes in which Harry sees (or imagines?) a murder taking place on the adjacent terrace, the music shrieks with an unnerving pitch, which juxtaposes appropriately with the image of blood smeared on the glass.

Even an innocent little ditty is shadowed with a menacing, ominous quality as when Harry’s semi-girlfriend Amy Fredericks (Teri Garr) sings, “When the Red Red Robin, comes bob bob bobbin’ along….” Harry who is ambivalent in his affections toward Amy to begin with seems subtly startled by her singing it, and when he later plays the tapes and listens to Ann’s singing the same song, there is an eerie quality involved. The sound design at points removes all other ambient sounds except for the singing which lends a somewhat ghostly feeling to the scene. Harry is propelled to wonder at the coincidence as we do too. Is there perhaps a possibility that even Amy Fredericks, the person we see as being the most intimate to Harry, is somehow involved in the mystery?

In The Conversation, the recurrence of certain sounds over and over again serves several purposes. One of the most important repeated sounds is the recording of various lines of dialogue stolen from the young couple. They play over and over in Harry’s mind, and sometimes in reality as well as he plays and fiddles with the tapes, and his guilt and fears and suspicions are aroused. Several times the words we hear comment on Harry Caul’s character itself. For instance, we hear Ann comment “He’s not hurting anyone” on the tape, and we sense that this is what Harry is trying to convince himself about himself (“I am in no way responsible” Caul tried absolving himself earlier in the confessional scene).

And the hooker Meredith (Elizabeth MacRae) whom Harry met at the surveillance convention, seduces Harry into bed and as he lies there we hear from the tape again: “He was once somebody’s baby boy. And now there he is half-dead on a park bench, and where are all his aunts and uncles now?” We feel as though Harry is that lonely man on the park bench that Ann referred to on the tape. We know Harry himself had a troubled childhood himself, being partially paralyzed physically (and later as an adult, emotionally).

It’s perhaps not an unintentional byproduct of the film that it reverberates with political meaning having been made so soon after the Watergate scandal as it was. It was nowhere more evident that technology could be a man’s undoing especially when trying to keep a recorded event of conversations as a way of self-protection and only to have that same intention turned on its ear and becoming a liability.

Before Harry enters the Director’s (Duvall) office to deliver the photographs he has also taken in conjunction with the recordings, we hear from outside the door, “I can’t stand it anymore” again emanating from the tape. It is as if the Director himself were saying this in anguish after learning the truth about the affair. Later however, in the hotel room, this same sentence recurs when Harry bugs room 773, Ann and Mark’s room via his bathroom, only now the sentence takes on different implications. Now the line sounds as though it is coming from characters on the brink of committing an extreme act out of desperation or frustration.

Hackman’s performance here is a revelation, a creation worlds apart from the hard-surfaced pulpy tough guys audiences had become accustomed to seeing him in films at the time like The French Connection, and The Poseidon Adventure. Here in The Conversation, his Harry Caul is alternately timid and paralyzed, a man who spends almost the whole of his life with machines, and is so inept actually at securing is own privacy (despite a triple-locked apartment, his landlord has been able to enter his apartment and has read his mail). On top of that he became woefully vulnerable himself to the prank bugging by colleague William P. Bernie Moran (Allen Garfield) at the surveillance convention. Caul’s discomfort and unfamiliarity with people themselves has rendered him susceptible to the very investigative technology he traffics in.

One machine that keeps reappearing in name and image is the telephone. It is as if Harry Caul (Call? Pun intended?) has trouble communicating with people on a personal level, so as a result much of his communication is done by telephone. He calls the Director from a phone booth as another patron taps (pun intended again?) impatiently against the glass of the booth. He tells his landlord by phone that he wants to make sure that he and only he has the only set of keys to his apartment. He calls Martin Stett (Harrison Ford), the Director’s assistant, who informs Caul that they have a full dossier on Harry. Harry even has to call the operator for his girlfriend Amy’s phone listing, that’s how removed he is intimately from her. Amy even confesses earlier that “I even think you’re listening to me when I talk on the telephone.” And as if to comment on the fact that Ann thinks she’s being bugged, she says “I think he’s been recording my telephone calls.” The ringing of the telephone haunts Caul as at the end of the film when he answers it twice, the second time hearing a warning that he’s being watched. By this time, our own doubts are alerted that this may be a figment of Harry’s imagination. Not only are real sounds and dialogue subject to reinterpretation, but by the end we can’t even be sure that some sounds and dialogue have even occurred at all.

Another meaningful sound design technique is the amplification of certain sounds. In The Conversation, Harry Caul’s elevator ride is marked by an unusually loud whooshing. This disturbs the audience as does Harry’s seeing Ann aboard the very elevator car he rides on his way up to the office of the man who has hired him to spy on Ann. The amplification of the aforementioned man tapping on the phone booth also serves to accentuate the annoyance Harry feels as pressures mount.

Sounds are also used to disguise other sounds as is shown by several scenes. In order for example for Harry to drill a hole through a wall, Caul must continually flush the toilet beside him. And although the toilet is aiding him then in his sneaking, it will later betray him with its regurgitation of what is possibly the blood evidence of the murderous events that have possibly resulted from his actions.

More subtle instance of sounds concealing reality occur as when a pen actually serves to deceive Harry, invading his privacy. The deception is revealed at a party back in his work loft, thusly making the sting of the humiliation all the more pointed. A Christmas present, a hearing aid, and a harmonica tone also manage to disguise events during the course of the film. Harry becomes progressively more paranoid about sounds and other things as the movie unfolds. He cautiously eyes a man with a vacuum cleaner in the hallway of the Director’s building—curiously, we don’t share his suspicion as an audience, but yet the man seems to attract Harry’s suspicion. It’s almost as though Harry is cursed with his well-versed knowledge in how things and objects can be other than what they appear to be. His awareness of this fact due to his work, has created a heightened paranoia in him.

The Conversation, one might argue, might be as much about sound itself and our subjective perception of it, as it is about the film’s other themes. In so many instances, sound techniques in the film (by production recordists Nat Boxer, Michael Evje, Art Rochester, and sound designer Water Murch) even help to embellish and expostulate on themes such as the effect of loneliness and isolation on a man’s psyche. Because of the creative way that sound is used in this film, it is evident that sound can also be as innovative a way as other motion picture elements such as cinematography and editing.


Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older