Welcome (*static*) I’d Like to (*prolonged static*) The Conversation! Starring (*street music*) surveillance expert (*continued street music*). So grab your noise-canceling headph (*overlapping conversations*) and read on!
Previews
What, if anything, did we know about this coming attraction before we watched it?
Ellen: Okay, you know at the end of Season 3 of Stranger Things, and Robin is listing off her favorite movies as part of her interview for a job at the video store? I misremembered The Conversation as one of the ones she said. It was The Apartment. That’s the foundation of sand upon which I built this pick!
Tyler: The only thing I vaguely recall about this movie is that it was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, which initially struck me as odd because he must’ve been quite busy with The Godfather movies at the time, right? Turns out, not only was The Godfather Part II also released in 1974, but it was also nominated for Best Picture. In doing so, Coppola (Ford Coppola? FFC? “The Cope”?) joined exclusive company1 to have directed two movies nominated for Best Picture in the same year, a truly impressive feat. All this to say, I know jack shit about the actual plot of The Conversation.
Plots & Feelings
This one’s pretty self-explanatory.
Short Version (courtesy of IMDb): A paranoid, secretive surveillance expert has a crisis of conscience when he suspects that the couple he is spying on will be murdered.
Long Version (modified from Wikipedia and formatted to fit your screen):
Lunchtime at San Francisco’s Union Square is absolutely bustling with folks out shopping, business people taking an afternoon break, and street performers miming and playing music. Amongst the noisy crowd is a woman in a red coat with a nondescript man. The two pace the square, deep in Conversation, but pausing when anyone gets too close. They’re right to be suspicious, because just half a block away is a surveillance van run by expert-in-the-field Harry Caul2. He’s monitoring the operation closely, which involves two different men on roofs and a third with a microphone concealed in a shopping bag. Unlike his partner, Stan, Harry has no interest in who the couple is or who hired him. His only concern is getting a “nice, fat recording.”
Ellen: Stan speculates that the recording may be for the “Infernal Revenue Service” and while that’s probably done to death by now, it’s a decent burn!
Tyler: Perhaps the burn will become more en vogue after Biden unleashes his army of tax auditors upon the middle class. It is a nice little insight into how passionate Harry is about his job, since I feel like most people have an equivalent of a “nice, fat recording” that they get excited about at their job. Like, just give me a nice, fat Excel workbook.
Harry is obsessed with his own privacy, you see. His main concern upon finding a gift-wrapped bottle of wine for his birthday is not who sent it, but the fact that his landlord has a spare key to his place. He breaks up with his girlfriend rather than tell her where he works or lives. (It’s revealed that he’s spied on her multiple times, so really babe, no great loss!) Harry has no home phone (allegedly), no car, and seemingly no hobbies besides custom-building his own surveillance equipment and playing saxophone. He heads to his warehouse workshop to start dissecting the tapes from yesterday’s Conversation, meticulously playing all three reels at once, adjusting levels and switching between tapes as needed to try and tune out the copious background noise. No wonder Harry’s a pre-eminent attendee of an upcoming surveillance conference, a thing that apparently exists! He’s got bigger fish to fry first, though, because he’s supposed to deliver the finished tapes to “the Director” at his office tomorrow.
Tyler: I genuinely didn’t understand the nature of his relationship with his girlfriend. I learned that they were “dating” by reading the Wikipedia synopsis.
At the horribly Brutalist office, Harry meets not the Director, but his assistant Martin, whose tie is about a foot wide, but he did make Christmas cookies, so…? Despite the baked goods, Martin is extremely pushy about accepting the tapes on his boss’s behalf. Harry has to wrest them out of the other man’s hands and be like “I’ll get my $15,0003 later, thanks.” In the elevator back downstairs, who should enter but Ann, the woman from the Conversation! Awkward. A disquieted Harry heads back to his workplace, and after kicking Stan out for being annoying, he unearths several pertinent items from the audio: the couple believes they’re being followed, there’s a meeting at the Jack Tar Hotel at 3:00 on Sunday, and most importantly “he’d kill us if he got the chance.” That’s enough to send any devout Catholic to confession! He eventually tells his priest that he’s worried two people are going to be hurt by his work, and that it has happened before! He repeats, almost to himself, that he’s not responsible.4
Anyway, it’s time for Big Brother Con, which is not a symposium for fans of the reality TV hit, if you can believe it! All the greats are there: Spectre5, Silent Knight, and even Bernie from Detroit, who definitely doesn’t steal his designs from competitors and have a weird vendetta with (disguised as professional respect for) Harry. From realizing Stan is working for Bernie on the side to Bernie himself slipping a pen into his pocket without permission, Harry isn’t having, like, the best time, so it’s also not great that Martin has shown up demanding the tapes! They plan to meet on Sunday, but first, it’s afterparty at the workshop time! The gang’s all here, including some lady-hangers-on and Bernie, for some reason. Bernie’s busy trying to get a look at Harry’s equipment and methods while Harry is busy trying to convince a gal that a relationship where she knows nothing about him, ever, is a really nice prospect. Bernie gets more and more heated, demanding to know how Harry pulled off the teamster job in Chicago, which resulted in the murders of 3 people because the boss thought someone squealed. Harry doesn’t reply, so Bernie plays a recording of his conversation with the woman, taped off of the pen he’d put in his pocket. Harry kicks everyone out except her, and they fall asleep to the sounds of the Conversation. After a series of disturbing dreams, both her and the tapes are gone.
Harry is understandably freaking out, and the fact that Martin got ahold of Harry’s home phone number (if we recall, Harry previously insisted he didn’t have a home phone) isn’t helping. He goes back to the office to find Martin and the Director listening to the Conversation. The Director doesn’t respond when Harry asks what he’ll do to her. He’s given his money and removed from the premises. He decides to go to the Jack Tar Hotel and get a room next to 773, which was mentioned on the tapes. Harry pulls out a blue case of tools and sets about finding the best eavesdropping position. He eventually hears Ann and the Director in the next room, playing the Conversation, and a commotion breaks out! Harry leaps up from his position under the bathroom sink and stares at the wall connecting his room to theirs in panic. He goes out to the balcony in time to see Ann’s bloody hand make a print on the frosted glass! This dude literally hides under his covers.
Ellen: This is a really excellent performance of a guy who sees himself as a neutral observer being thrust into a horrible situation, and he does not have the emotional maturity to handle it.
Finally daring to exit his blanket fort, Harry picks the lock to room 773 and finds it absolutely pristine. His examination of the scene takes him to the bathroom, where everything looks clean and normal until THE TOILET OVERFLOWS WITH BLOOD! Sickened, Harry storms back to the Director’s office building, where he’s unable to force his way upstairs. As he leaves, a limo pulls up, and inside… is Ann! He clocks a newspaper declaring that “Auto Crash Kills Executive,” and it all falls into place. In a series of flashbacks, we see that Ann and the other man lured the Director to that room and killed him, but he almost was able to fight back on the balcony, which is what Harry saw. The emphasis from the Conversation was actually, “he’d kill us if he got the chance.”
Back at his apartment, Harry plays the saxophone. He’s really into it until his phone rings, and it’s Martin! He plays back a recording of the last few seconds of sax music and tells Harry they know that he knows, and they’ll be listening. Harry begins sweeping his apartment for bugs, searching and smashing every object as needed, including a statue of the Virgin Mary (reluctantly)6. Soon he’s down to the floors and walls, and he rips those apart too in a frenzy. We’re treated to a slow pan of the wreckage of the apartment, and all that’s left is Harry playing saxophone, the only item still intact.
Ellen: Okay, so Martin is in on it, and presumably that’s why he was so insistent about getting the tapes to the Director. If the idea was to fake overhearing the plan for a lovers’ rendezvous to lure the victim to the hotel, why did they make it so dang hard to decipher? Is Martin the new Director, and that’s what he had to gain? Did Martin run his own con unbeknownst to Ann in order to blackmail her after the fact? So many questions, Movie, so many questions.
Intermission
Even though ILTBTA is free, please indulge us further and enjoy this quick “advertisement.”
This installment of ILTBTA is brought to you by … Minding Your Business!
A surveillance convention where you end up being humiliated? Building heaps of custom equipment? Sweating it out in a cramped van with a coworker that you hate? No thank you, sir. All this and more can be avoided by simply minding your business.
Mind Your Business: It’s Free!
Wiki-Wiki-Whaaat?
Love a good Wikipedia rabbit hole in search of some fun facts? Us too.
The Conversation’s Wikipedia page has some interesting facts and anecdotes that we recommend you read through, but here are a few of our favorites:
Despite using the same surveillance and wire-tapping equipment as the Nixon administration prior to (and presumably during) the Watergate scandal, The Conversation’s script was finished before Nixon even became president, with filming completing before the first Watergate stories broke.
Ellen: Nixon didn’t invent surveillance scandals, but he sure popularized them!
Haskell Wexler was the original cinematographer for The Conversation, but was replaced with Bill Butler shortly after production began after “severe creative and personal differences” with Francis Ford Coppola. The only scene of Wexler’s that wasn’t reshot was the opening surveillance scene in Union Square. After The Conversation, Wexler was the cinematographer for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest before again running into creative differences with the director and being replaced with … Bill Butler, again.
Tyler: Can’t say I’ve ever seen the phrase “severe creative differences” before, but now I’m dying to know what they were.
John Cazale, who played Harry’s co-worker/colleague/friend (?) Stan, appeared in five movies over a seven year period in the 1970s, all of which were nominated for Best Picture: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter.
Harry Caul was inspired by real-life surveillance expert Martin Kaiser, who was a technical consultant on The Conversation. Kaiser said that the bug in the final scene of the movie (which he says is in Harry’s saxophone) was inspired by passive listening devices created by Léon Theremin. In addition to covert listening devices (like “The Thing”), Theremin was also known for inventing the theremin musical instrument7, which features heavily in the soundtrack of …
Ellen: I still kind of like to interpret the ending as there not being a bug in the house at all, and that he’s so unwell at that point that he forgets that the means of surveillance doesn’t have to be physically in his apartment.
Honorable Mentions
What other movies should you be watching?
Spellbound is a slow-burn psychological thriller from 1945 directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. It tells the story of a new psychoanalyst at a Vermont hospital (Bergman) falling in love with the head of the hospital (Peck), before coming to realize that he might not be all that he seems. Enjoy the twists, turns, a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí, and plenty of theremin (which helped composer Miklós Rózsa win the Oscar for Best Original Score).
This is normally the part where we tell you the streaming services on which to watch/rent the movie we just recommended. Unfortunately, Spellbound is only available to watch on random YouTube channels like this one, but we promise it’s worth it! If you have a smart TV or Chromecast, you can easily watch it on your (presumably much larger) television screen.
Fill In The Blank
How did we really feel about The Academy nominating this?
Ellen: I’d like to give the Academy some homemade Christmas cookies! Like Tyler, I’m going to be chewing on this one for a while, but I know that I enjoyed it. Gene Hackman’s performance gets better the more I think about it, and it combines some twists and turns with the slow unraveling of Harry’s character. There are a lot of little touches that I appreciated, though wow, watching him interact with other characters was downright painful at times. This movie also fed you nothing, leaving you to fend for yourself to figure it out, and as you can see from Plots & Feelings, I still have a lot of questions!
Tyler: I’d like to ask the Academy for an extension to continue sorting out my feelings about The Conversation. On the one hand it’s an interesting character study combined with a slow-burn mystery, but it’s also a study of a not-particularly-exciting character that burns just a touch too slow for my liking. It’s tough to watch Harry dedicate his entire life to his profession (to the detriment of any semblance of a social life, or even social skills) and then not even be good enough at it in his personal life: he gets bested/noticed by his landlady, his girlfriend, and the annoying Bernie, not to mention whomever was listening to him at the end of the movie. Harry seems to listen so much that he can't hold a conversation with anyone, which doesn’t exactly make for a compelling protagonist.
And yet there were still several things I liked about this movie overall: the acting, cinematography, and score8 were all fantastic and really added to the film. For a more intelligent review, check out this movie blog I stumbled across while searching for gifs, which should really tell you where I focus my ILTBTA energy.
Let The Credits Roll
Thanks for reading! Some quick housekeeping as you exit the theatre:
If you have plots and feelings of your own (on the movie or ILTBTA in general), feel free to comment on the post or simply reply to the email. If you liked reading this: tell your friends! If you hated reading this: tell your friends how much you hated it by forwarding it to them!
If you’re a weirdo like Tyler and use Twitter, feel free to follow us there @BlankTheAcademy for ILTBTA updates, rejected jokes, and other random movie-related musings. Once we reach a million followers, we’ll offer to purchase the @ILTBTA handle from the butthead who snagged it before us.
If you’d like to start a wild Best Picture journey of your own, feel free to download a copy of The Spreadsheet. Bonus: checking off the boxes is oddly satisfying.
Post-Credits Scene
Get a sneak peek at the next ILTBTA installment.
Who wants more Scorsese (“more-sese”)? We hope you do, because our next ILTBTA movie will be Martin Scorsese’s 2011 film Hugo. An adventure focusing on a young boy and his late father’s automaton, Hugo stars young actors Asa Butterfield and Chloё Grace Moretz. Hugo is available to stream for free with an HBO Max subscription (which is even more worthwhile given a current promotional rate)9 and can be rented from all the other usual spots.
Until then, call the Property Brothers or somebody before ruining your floors for no reason!
Tyler: Lol at the article wondering if House of Gucci or The Last Duel, movies that were uh not super well-received, would help add Ridley Scott to the list.
Ellen: House of Gucci was not good. The best part was the Shake Shack I snuck into the theater.
Ellen: Do you think in the future he’ll patent… Caul-er ID??
Around $96k in today’s dollars!
Sounds like my ex-wife!
Tyler: I got a nice chuckle out of this and will blindly assume it is a reference to the evil organization in several James Bond books/movies.
This was a capital-m Metaphor.
Highly recommend the Loki soundtrack, which utilizes the theremin to great effect!
Shout-out to those spooky-ass single piano notes.
Hey HBO: we accept cash, check, Venmo, and contributions to the honeymoon fund.