5 Years, 50 Films: The Conversation

Anyone who has been to film school 101 will be able to tell you about Francis Ford Coppola's great works of the 70's. Three of those have, it seems, an automatic place in the great pantheon of cinema.  I love the fourth the most.

'The Conversation', positioned between the first two chapters of the Godfather trilogy, is that very rare breed of cinema that resonates in greater volumes the more the years pass. Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), plays a wiretapper caught in the crosshairs of an hour long conversation between a couple as they amble around a congested square mumbling words and phrases to one another laced with fear and secrecy.

Being "the best bugger on the west coast" isn't particularly what makes this film so great.  Ostensibly, this is a taut thriller with a big twist (a dirty word these days), but and its a big but, this is a character study dressed in a thriller's clothes.  Caul is a private man, one who prefers his own company and is awkward around women.  The privacy and the paranoia over protecting it is the very same as those whose he is detangling.  This is someone who is truly great at his chief skill but tragically lacking in every other department.

Considering the great performances by Gene Hackman (of which there are many) this is certainly on the opposite of the end of the spectrum dynamic wise.  Here is a man whose inner turmoil speaks louder than any external rage.  At any moment there is a tension that remains for the viewer that everything could boil over and a clattering of violence would be laid upon all in front of him.

Without overstating the obvious connections to the modern world and our evergrowing fastidiousness in protecting what we believe to be ours, battling against the 'open and connected',  a fascinating angle of this film, not withstanding Hackman's performance, is that here is a man at the very centre of the society in which he operates who understands the world via a technological standpoint.  It would seem to me that Harry Caul was a precursor for me, you and much of today's world;

Ordinary people making our point through a mask; filtered voices trying to make sense of it all.