The Conversation

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

• Director: Francis Ford Coppola
• Genre:Crime / Drama / Mystery / Thriller
• Runtime:114 minutes

Cast

Gene Hackman : Harry Caul
John Cazale : Stan
Allen Garfield : William P. ‘Bernie’ Moran
Frederic Forrest: Mark
Cindy Williams : Ann

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a surveillance expert who runs his own company in San Francisco. He is highly respected by others in the profession. Caul is obsessed with his own privacy; his apartment is almost bare behind its triple-locked door, he uses pay phones to make calls and claims to have no home telephone, and his office is enclosed in wire mesh in a corner of a much larger warehouse. Caul is utterly professional at work but he finds personal contact difficult. He is uncomfortable in dense crowds and withdrawn and taciturn in more intimate situations. He is also reticent and secretive with work colleagues. He is nondescript in appearance, except for his habit of wearing a translucent plastic raincoat virtually everywhere he goes, even when it is not raining.

Despite his insistence that his professional code means that he is not responsible for worrying about the actual content of the conversations he records or the uses to which his clients put his surveillance activities, he is, in fact, wracked by guilt over a past wiretap job that left three people dead. His sense of guilt is sharpened by his devout Catholicism. His one hobby is playing along with his favorite jazz records on a tenor saxophone in the privacy of his apartment.

Caul and his friend Stan (John Cazale) have taken on the task of monitoring the conversation of a couple (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) as they walk through crowded Union Square in San Francisco. This challenging task is accomplished but Caul feels increasingly agonized over his doubts about the actual meaning of the conversation and about what may happen to the couple once the client hears the tape. He plays the tape again and again throughout the movie, refining its accuracy (by catching one key, though ambiguous, phrase hidden under the sound of a street musician: “He’d kill us if he got the chance”) and constantly reinterpreting its meaning in the light of what he knows and what he guesses. Read more