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Post by Popeye Doyle on Jan 19, 2021 16:55:44 GMT
As Roger Ebert points out, - His colleagues in the surveillance industry think Harry Caul is such a genius that we realize with a little shock how bad he is at his job. Here is a man who is paid to eavesdrop on a conversation in a public place. He succeeds, but then allows the tapes to be stolen. His triple-locked apartment is so insecure that the landlord is able to enter it and leave a birthday present. His mail is opened and read. He thinks his phone is unlisted, but both the landlord and a client have it. At a trade show, he allows his chief competitor to fool him with a mic hidden in a freebie ballpoint. His mistress tells him: “Once I saw you up by the staircase, hiding and watching for a whole hour.”
Snuggled between two Godfathers, this is a decidedly low key effort from Coppola but remains intelligent, well directed, and especially well acted. With a narrow minded obsession not that unfamiliar to The French Connection, Gene Hackman's performance is really fucking good here. We know so little about Caul. Beyond his love of his saxophone, he only drops his guard at his most vulnerable (this includes a hauntingly filmed dream sequence) but quickly retreats back inside. The editing and sound design brought to mind Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981), both of which trace back to Blow-up (1966). The most powerful scene is probably the end when Caul tears his place apart searching for listening equipment.
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Post by politicidal on Jan 19, 2021 17:05:15 GMT
7/10.
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Post by mortsahlfan on Jan 19, 2021 17:07:00 GMT
Some great points you make.
Great movie. 8.5/10
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Post by bravomailer on Jan 19, 2021 17:08:25 GMT
Great film. One of the handful of films that John Cazale appeared in, all of which won Best Picture. Post-Vietnam/Watergate paranoia along with The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, and others.
There's a significant flaw in the change of inflection in a recorded voice ("He'd kill us if he got the chance") which changes the sentence's meaning and the characters' innocence.
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Post by Popeye Doyle on Jan 19, 2021 17:21:08 GMT
Great film. One of the handful of films that John Cazale appeared in, all of which won Best Picture. Post-Vietnam/Watergate paranoia along with The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, and others. There's a significant flaw in the change of inflection in a recorded voice ("He'd kill us if he got the chance") which changes the sentence's meaning and the characters' innocence. Checking out The Parallax View tonight.
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Post by Captain Spencer on Jan 19, 2021 20:39:44 GMT
A masterful character study of a very insecure man. Really instills a creepy feeling of paranoia, and the vision of the murder sequence is frightening enough to compete with the very best horror movies. Moody, downbeat, perhaps a little slow at times, but always a fascinating drama. Excellent performances all around, but I think the stand-out has to be Allen Garfield as one of Harry's competitors.
The Conversation also hits home as a scathing commentary on the use of surveillance, how it can be abused and be an intrusion of privacy. That shocking ending says it all.
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Post by sdrew13163 on Jan 19, 2021 22:30:22 GMT
Very good movie. Slightly too slow for my tastes but still enjoyable. Coppola was so great in the ‘70s.
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Post by hi224 on Jan 20, 2021 0:00:38 GMT
As Roger Ebert points out, - His colleagues in the surveillance industry think Harry Caul is such a genius that we realize with a little shock how bad he is at his job. Here is a man who is paid to eavesdrop on a conversation in a public place. He succeeds, but then allows the tapes to be stolen. His triple-locked apartment is so insecure that the landlord is able to enter it and leave a birthday present. His mail is opened and read. He thinks his phone is unlisted, but both the landlord and a client have it. At a trade show, he allows his chief competitor to fool him with a mic hidden in a freebie ballpoint. His mistress tells him: “Once I saw you up by the staircase, hiding and watching for a whole hour.”
Snuggled between two Godfathers, this is a decidedly low key effort from Coppola but remains intelligent, well directed, and especially well acted. With a narrow minded obsession not that unfamiliar to The French Connection, Gene Hackman's performance is really fucking good here. We know so little about Caul. Beyond his love of his saxophone, he only drops his guard at his most vulnerable (this includes a hauntingly filmed dream sequence) but quickly retreats back inside. The editing and sound design brought to mind Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981), both of which trace back to Blow-up (1966). The most powerful scene is probably the end when Caul tears his place apart searching for listening equipment.
Nice analysis.
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senan90
Junior Member
@senan90
Posts: 1,452
Likes: 546
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Post by senan90 on Jan 20, 2021 0:03:00 GMT
Not reading that stupid Ebert excerpt. The Conversation is a brilliant film; Coppola's best in my opinion.
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Post by OldAussie on Jan 20, 2021 0:07:41 GMT
A major flaw in an otherwise excellent film.
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Post by wmcclain on Jan 20, 2021 2:02:41 GMT
The Conversation (1974), written, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. A curiously floating, unrooted thriller. Even the music has a directionless chromatic quality, like a spinning compass needle. Some aspects are definite: we know that Harry Caul is a legend in his field of wiretapping and audio surveillance. He's a lonely, anonymous-looking man, a paranoid who does not like to be questioned. He just does the job and says "I don't care what they're talking about" but that is not entirely true. He has a secret sorrow: once his tapes caused a family to be murdered and he doesn't want it to happen again. But what is this current assignment? Who are the man and woman he taped at lunch time in Union Square? He learns his evidence is dangerous and becomes obsessed with the case. What have they done, or what's going to be done to them? We have no idea who's who or what's what and go over the scene again and again, becoming audio voyeurs, trying to squeeze some meaning out of fragments of conversation. Harry figures that a murder is pending. But he figures it wrong. Gene Hackman is always excellent. Young Harrison Ford appears as a sinister executive. I like the presentation of the surveillance subculture, invisible to the outer world, even though they have their own trade show. It's a gray area and some of them are cops. Available on Blu-ray. Netflix doesn't have it.
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