The Conversation

Gene Hackman and Francis Ford Coppola teamed up to produce this pre-Watergate tale of private espionage and paranoia. They steal the show between them, with Hackman playing Harry Caul, a surveillance expert whose own life is secretive and exclusionary. Coppola directs with intensity, focusing ever closer on Caul with a concentrated scrutiny to which Hackrnan stands up impressively, but Caul does not.

The film's main thrust is a moral to one: to what extent does someone have the right to submit anyone else's actions to observation and subsequent judgement? This message is frighteningly underlined by a switch in Caul's position from observer to observed, which extends back to and questions one's own position as vicarious viewer of the film.

Caul, who plays the saxaphone along to records, ends up performing solo as he realises that all the time he has been playing along to someone else's tune. Coppola shows what he was capable of before he turned, as Caul refuses to do, to gimmickry and commercialism (as in the recent Bram Stoker's Dracula). Devastating.

Review by Iain Lang
Taken from EUFS Programme 1994-95