Elizabeth MacRae fully nude in The Conversation (1974)

Now available in 4K, this American drama-thriller-mystery (but really more of an art film) comes from an era when people came out of the theater debating about the film’s important ideas.

A paranoid, secretive surveillance expert has a crisis of conscience when he suspects that the couple he is spying on will be murdered.

Metacritic: 88
Tomato Meter: 94%
Popcorn Meter: 89%
IMDb: 7.7

There are lots of interesting stories behind this one.

Just a few examples:

The film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, but lost. Coppola couldn’t have been that disappointed, however, since he was close to the man who won. In fact, he saw him every morning in the mirror. That’s right, back when only five films were nominated for Best Picture, Coppola snagged two of the five nominations in 1974. He won with The Godfather Part II.

This was one of Johnny Cazale’s five films. You know him best as Fredo in The Godfather. He died very young (42), but he definitely went out on top. (1) Every feature film he ever acted in was nominated as Best Picture; three of them won – and that’s three out of a maximum of four, because two of them were in the same year; (2) Somehow, this odd-looking man was engaged to Meryl Streep, providing hope for all of us normal douchebags!

This film absolutely provokes the widest range of opinions from observers. It makes the opinions of The English Patient seem like they come from a hive mind. IMDb commenter Joe Chamberlain argued that it is, “Quite possibly the worst film ever made. 0/10”, while another commenter named Drew Hanks wrote, “The best American film ever made? Absolutely.” So it’s either the worst or the best film ever made in America!

You may enjoy seeing some future stars in small roles: Harrison Ford, Teri Garr and Cindy Williams make appearances.

You may also enjoy seeing Gene Hackman as a meek, laconic techno-nerd rather than his usual swaggering tough guy.

Elizabeth MacRae got completely naked, albeit in darkness and far from the camera, yet she never appeared in any other topless or nude scene. She spend most of her career on broadcast TV, in soap operas and prime-time shows. She died in 2024, 35 years after she retired from acting.

4K video. As with many 4K videos, GoFile will not stream it properly, but it should download and play properly.

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The critical reactions have shown me that few of you will be lukewarm about this film. Half of you will think it is a masterpiece and the other half will think it stinks. I’m going to try to tell you why these differences of opinion exist.

WARNING: TOTAL SPOILERS

Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, the world’s greatest expert on electronic surveillance. His current assignment is to produce an evidence-quality tape of two people holding a conversation as they stroll through a public square, surrounded by hundreds of people, band music, and traffic noises. No problem for Harry. He devises an elaborate multi-mike system, and he splices together bits and pieces from each source, ultimately producing a perfect record of the conversation.

In earlier times, an amoral Harry strove for technical perfection and didn’t really consider the ethical side of his actions. He never listened to what was on the tapes, but concentrated strictly on the fidelity of the recording. But life is changing him. Now he thinks of more than whether he has the right words on tape in the right order, or whether they are audible and clear. He thinks about the human lives – the lives of the invaders of privacy and the invaded as well. He has started to obsess about the ultimate consequences of his work. For example, suppose you’re the world’s greatest eavesdropper, and you can tap a conversation that the participants think to be unbuggable – they’re out on a rented rowboat, far from land, discussing an illegal matter entirely between them. What might happen if you bug such a discussion? When that conversation is compromised, each of the men – eliminating the possibility of eavesdropping – will think the other leaked it. If one or the other is desperate enough, the result might be murder. In the specific case Harry was working on, the result was multiple murder. One of the parties killed not only the other guy, but the man’s entire family as well.

Harry has also begun to worry about an even darker side of his profession. He never knows whether he is working for the good guys, those who are trying to defend themselves against insidious forces, or for the bad guys, those who are using Harry’s skills to endanger innocent people. In the case of the young couple strolling through the public square, he fears they may be murdered by the people who hired him.

Obsessing about these matters has pushed Harry into an advanced state of psychological deterioration. The knowledge he possesses has taught him that it is virtually impossible to be free from eavesdropping, so he has become paranoid about his own life. He never tells anybody about anything. All his thoughts stay firmly locked inside him. This proves to be wise in some ways. For example, when he gets a little tipsy and has an intimate conversation with a woman, it turns out that one of his own business rivals taped the conversation with a fountain pen microphone which Harry took willingly as a souvenir from a convention. Harry had always been paranoid, but the fountain pen incident drove him to the edge of insanity. On the other hand, it’s just as well that Harry is cautious, because nothing is really as it seems in the film. Harry is right to be paranoid, but all wrong about the details, and he’s always aligning his attitudes on the wrong side of things. It turns out that his real enemy is not his blowhard enemy, but the very woman he has been romancing and protecting. She finishes a night of sex by stealing his tapes after he falls asleep. Harry’s ultimate mental deterioration occurs when he realizes that his own apartment has been bugged. The ending reminded me of Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart.” Like Poe’s character, Hackman tears up his floorboards at the end of the film, vainly trying to expose the bug, as if it were “the beating of his hideous heart.” In a figurative way, it is. It is the sound of his own voice, magnified a hundredfold in his mind. He tears apart everything he owns and leaves the room in a condition approximating the look of Berlin in the last days of WW2. In the stylized final scene of the film he sits amid the debris in a rickety chair, forlorn, playing a disconsolate saxophone solo while the credits roll.

That’s what the movie is all about.

The critics seemed to agreed that the premise was excellent, and everyone seemed to love the masterful first scene during the opening credits, in which Harry created an ingenious solution to the problem of taping the strolling people in a public square. Where the critics started to follow divergent paths was in evaluating the execution of the idea. The idea behind the film is to show the gradual deterioration of Harry’s mind, and to show how his paranoia is fueled in equal parts by correct and incorrect assumptions. Writer/director Francis Ford Coppola elected to portray this process through Harry’s mind rather than through the view of an omniscient narrator. Since Harry’s mind is deteriorating and he is unable to distinguish real clues from red herrings, the film’s narrative structure is complex. Some of the scenes seem unnecessary, and some of the characters seem irrelevant to the development of the plot. The film’s defenders would argue that these things are necessary to illuminate Harry’s state of mind, because he himself can’t see the connections, and he doesn’t know where the real threat is coming from.

Years ahead of its time, the film made a powerful case that the invasion of privacy is even more insidious than we think, because our own rights are at stake. Harry could be hired by our boss or our wife, and his work could be used against us. When this door is opened, the storm rages through the room, and nobody can stay sheltered inside. The right to privacy shelters nobody or everybody. The Conversation was released in 1974, the same year Nixon resigned, during a period of heightened global awareness of taped conversations. Nixon himself was the ultimate paranoiac.

If you would like to see a detailed examination of a paranoid man’s state of mind through his own confused eyes, you will consider this a brilliant and daring film, creepy and chilling. If you prefer more conventional narratives with plenty of action, you might hate this film and think it is slower than continental drift, because nothing much happens. In that way, it’s similar to a Northern European art film. My first reaction to it was tepid, but I watched it again a second time – not every scene, but the scenes I really liked, which were numerous – and I ended up very impressed by the craftsmanship on display. Then I dug into the DVD’s special features: a documentary and extensive commentary, and the damned thing really hooked me in. If you keep an open mind, The Conversation can be engrossing in its own non-traditional way.