Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation
It's been a few weeks since I've seen The Conversation, feeling somewhat too lazy to write the damn review for it. In any case, I think I can recall enough of this film to give a half-decent judgment of it.
The Conversation was Francis Ford Coppola's in-between project, made after his huge success of The Godfather, and followed by The Godfather Part II. While The Conversation wasn't a huge hit, it was acclaimed enough that it managed to be nominated for Best Picture alongside The Godfather Part II, creating one of those rare situations where a filmmaker was competing against himself.
The movie stars Gene Hackman as an expert in professional electronic surveillance, which is a vague, polite way of saying that he is paid to spy on others, for the benefit of whomever wants the information. As the movie begins, he and his crew spy on a couple walking around the city. The way these people spy is pretty ingenious. There's one guy with something that looks almost like a sniper scope, but really a high-powered mike, sitting at a long distance in a building, while Hackman and another guy try to blend in with the activity, carrying hidden mikes, and other sorts of equipment. During this sequence, we get some tantalizing hints of what the couple are talking about, but of course, occasionally the sound goes bad, and other sorts of interference creeps in.
Hackman is very particular about certain aspects of his job. He delivers the goods to the company, whose boss supposedly wants the tapes, but Hackman has to get through his assistant (played by Harrison Ford in a very early role). Hackman gets into a scuffle, of sorts, and takes the tapes back home with him, saying that he will not give the tapes to anyone but the boss -- but Ford is creepy enough that he gets Hackman quite paranoid as he's leaving the building.
Hackman's professional life is clearly risky, if not, at first sight, tremendously exciting, but Hackman's personal life is quite lackluster. Most of the time, you'll find him alone in his apartment, playing saxophone along with his jazz records. Once in a while he hooks up with a woman, whom he meets at her apartment, but, even there, there isn't a lot of closeness in the relationship. Hackman's character is also suffering from a guilty conscience, not helped by a Catholic fear of God. He believes that he was responsible for the deaths of two people as a result of one of his assignments, and now he believes he might be responsible for two more......
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