"The Conversation" is the story of Harry Caul. Harry is the best recording artist on the West Coast. This isn't to say that he's in the music business. He records conversations between people. The movie opens with two people,a man and woman, walking around a crowded square in San Francisco at lunch time. They're having a conversation there because they are laboring under the impression no one can overhear them outside in a crowd. Wrong. Harry's just that good. Harry doesn't care too much about what exactly the targets are discussing, that's not his end of things. Harry's been hired by someone referred to only as "The Director", director of a corporation, not an intelligence agency, as we learn later. The only thing that gets Harry's attention is the woman's comment that "he'd kill us if he got the chance..."

Harry is not a very flashy person, a classic "grey man" out of Le Carre. You wouldn't give him a second look on the street. He's balding and dresses like an especially un-cool accountant. Harry lives in a decent but low-key apartment and works on his electronic equipment in a dingy warehouse. He hasn't told his girlfriend what he does for a living, she thinks he's a musician. Among his peers in the surveillance and counter-surveillance industry, however Harry Caul is a rock star.

Harry is played by Gene Hackman in what is reported to be his favorite role. Other notables in the cast are Teri Garr as his girlfriend Amy, Cindy Williams (Yeah, Shirley from the show) as the woman in the conversation, and an extremely young and rather preppy-fied Harrison Ford as The Director's sinister and oily assistant. The director (of the movie) is Francis Ford Coppola of "Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now" fame.

"The Conversation" was released in 1974 and is very much in the style of that time. The look and feel are gritty in rather in the style of another Hackman film "The French Connection", although without that film's earthy tone. The lighting is a bit on the drab side, the sound a little muddy and the costumes almost extravagantly realistic. Some of this look and feel may be due to limited budget but you can definitely see a style happening here.

One flashy thing is Harry's workshop and toolkit. In 1974 there were no computers in the surveillance and bugging racket (outside of the NSA, at least), everything in sight is tragically analog. Plugs and tubes and dials and clips and those nifty real-to-real tape recorders abound. I have a soft spot in my heart for this sort of paleo-tech. I actually used to have a real-to-real tape recorder like the ones Harry uses. Wasn't terribly useful, truth be told, but those reels going round and round... those were really something... (I've always wanted to have one of those IBM 1 Inch tape drives that all the computers in the old movies had too, but that's another story...)

Sound is a critical thing for a movie that forms it's plot around a recorded conversation. Coppola pays a lot of attention to the sound of the tapes of the event. The tape of the conversation is cruddy and plagued with weird-o interference and cruddy drop-outs. Much of this sounds a lot like the sound effects in two movies by Coppola's pal George Lucas, "THX-1138" and "Star Wars". Sound FX specialist Walter Munsch also worked on 'THX'.

For all it's status as a thriller film, "The Conversation's" pacing is rather on the stately side. It's really only the last twenty minutes or so that pays off the beginning of the movie. Apparently Coppola originally concieved the movie as a kind of horror film. Some of the quasi-supernatural elements of a horror script remain, several episodes of apparent clairvoyance and a creepy lucid dream where Harry explains himself to the woman on the tape. The deeply paranoid tone of the ending also puts you in mind of a horror film. Speaking of the ending, without revealing any spoilers, let's just say that the final plot twist rather put me in mind of some of M. Night Shyamalan's work.

The DVD comes with a respectable assortment of extras, trailer, director commentary and a "making-of" feature. One rather strange thing I gleaned from this was a sequence set at a surveillance and security convention was actually filmed at a surveillance and security convention, this struck me as odd because the people in that industry, especially those who manufacture surveillance and bugging equipment tend to keep a rather low profile.

This movie stands or falls on the performance of the star. Hackman does a fine job in the role. He portrays Harry as an oddly childlike and trusting man for the paranoia involved in his profession. Harry is an incomplete and broken little guy who ends up in control of nothing. Hackman played another furtive bugging expert in the 1998 "Enemy of the State". It's been stated that Hackman was playing the same role in both films but that's not really correct there are significant differences between the two characters. But there is definitely a good bit of Harry Caul in "Enemy's" Brill.

The pacing of this movie isn't what modern thriller fans are used to, more a steady winding of a spring than a thrill park roller-coaster ride. For Gene Hackman fans, spy-thriller aficionados and fans of Coppola's work this movie is a must-see. Others may not be so warmly rewarded.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older