Coppola's _The Conversation_

Night Moves

Easy Rider
Electra Glide In Blue

(matched set)

Shallow Grave

Weekend, of course, both film proper and end credits. It's more a matter of mood and gesture, but I find the last shot of Miller's Crossing strangely nihilistic...I think, I don't know; it's one of my favourite endings ever, but I'm not sure what feelings it conveys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHor-ixem6A

After relinquishing whatever privacy and anonymity he still possessed, Harry Caul has now lost control of this thread.

wowwwwwwwww

Never seen it before?

Nope, it was always on the list, decided to watch it tonight. I'm giving up the NFL and Sundays are going to be for fillum.

You made a fine choice. So what leapt out at you most?

The score, the static shots, the tightness of the editing, but mainly Hackman's performance. Great all-around.

45.

Re: great nihilistic endings. Morocco has a good one, I'd argue -- it's not properly romantic at all.

Five Easy Pieces?

I mean, abracadabra, Harry, show and tell--I'm number two, so I have to try harder.

after rating this film 55/100, one Theo Panayides:

Due to the outcry this rating has caused (I'm not kidding) I've decided not to try and explain myself at any length, since (a) it'd take ages to rebut all the arguments and (b) it's already been over a week since I saw it (for the second time, first viewing being about 8 years ago). Suffice to say the score is brilliant and the lengthy middle section where Harry brings the gang to his office/studio is a very impressive piece of staging - though also very obviously a set-piece, something distinct from the rest of the movie, designed for Coppola to Show His Mastery. But the hero is a very thin conceit (a one-dimensional control freak), playing his sax in conjunction with the solo is a pretty maudlin detail, the ending is so much cruder and snarkier than e.g. the one in REMAINS OF THE DAY (a similar tale of repression), Harry's "I can't let it happen again" is so clumsy it takes you right out of his dilemma (though the clumsiness makes some sense, given the sting in the tail), the Catholic guilt is so shallow and tacked-on it's almost insulting, the dream sequence sucks big-time, and I've never understood how the crucial line gets a different inflection at the end when we've heard it being spoken over and over. Am I missing something?...

http://my.primehome.com/theodorospa/oldies04.htm#convers

Haven't read this--should be fun.

At the most basic level:

and I've never understood how the crucial line gets a different inflection at the end when we've heard it being spoken over and over.

Because all the while we've been hearing it as Harry hears it--only at the end do we hear it as it actually is.

Thought there was more--that's the whole thing.

But the hero is a very thin conceit (a one-dimensional control freak)

Travis Bickle, Scottie Ferguson, maybe even Charles Foster Kane (the control freak part, anyway)--you could simplify lots of characters this way.

it also doesn't fully fit hackman's character.

after rating this film 55/100

How dare he!

I'm a control freak myself. At least two dimensions, though--occasionally I throw in a third one just to confuse people.

I don't find those three characters you brought up one-dimensional -- esp Scottie, you've gotta be kidding.

only at the end do we hear it as it actually is

This is on a level with "I meant Vader KILLED THE PART OF YOUR FATHER that was a Jedi" bullshit.

I don't find Harry any more or less one-dimensional than Scottie. (I'm fibbing, of course--I find Harry much more interesting.)

How is rendering something subjectively through the ears of an excessively paranoid guy "bullshit." I mean, we could argue about this forever--you're taking subjective responses to a film and treating them like fact. Some people love The Conversation, some people love Vertigo. That's just the way it is.

changing the emphasis of the line, especially in such a technoworld-set film, is a cheat to me.

I know what you're saying, and way back when I first saw the film, I think it bothered me too--think I even mentioned as much on an ungraduate paper. (I'll check tonight.) But I think it's a perfectly valid interpretation to say that through the whole film, where we're always looking at the conversation through Harry's eyes and ears, as he's hunched over his editing table, that we're hearing what he wants to hear (an expression of his guilt, a desire to save someone, lots of reasons). When he sees Williams and Forrest at the end, it's like he snaps out of his paranoia and hears the conversation as it is, for the first time. You may not agree, but I think that's a valid way to look at it. I mean, I don't think it was accidental or sloppy on Coppola's part--I'm sure he was aware the two recordings are different.

Clemenza at 19, 1980:

"A point should be raised about the transformation of emphasis from 'He'd kiss us..." to 'He'd kill us..." It is not the same recording--we have not misinterpreted like Harry. It is two distinct recordings, the change occurring because the first time we're hearing it through Harry's ears--a neat, if slightly unfair, trick by Coppola on the audience."

The paper (also on Save the Tiger, The Long Goodbye, and Mean Streets) was written for a guy who went on to make loads and loads of money producing Stripes, Ghostbusters, and other Ivan Reitman films. He gave me a checkmark there--very, very proud.

I actually wrote a second paper on (just) The Conversation three years later:

"Nowhere in The Conversation is Coppola's distrust of language better explicated, than in the transformation from 'he'd kill us if he had the chance' to 'he'd kill us if he had the chance'."

Haven't a clue what I meant by "distrust of language" (Coppola?), and I didn't know how to punctuate, either, so I'll just take a pass there.

It almost seems silly to play The Conversation and Vertigo off against each other, as they've got so much in common. (Someone once wrote that those two plus Petulia make up the great San Francisco trilogy of alienation or paranoia or something like that.) Harry and Scotty are both plagued by guilt over recent work-related deaths, they're both implicated in plots they don't understand until it's too late, both are exceptionally austere films by directors with great popular successes nearby, etc., etc.

Ahem--"kill us" way up top. The transformation wasn't quite that drastic.

the great San Francisco trilogy of alienation or paranoia or something like that

I don't see Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers in this trilogy.

Knock off The Conversation. That'll make room.

The paranoia and the locale, yes, but it's too funny. (Though Allen Garfield really makes me laugh in The Conversation.)

Have to watch Petulia again to see that. It's been seven years or so.

The Conversation is circles to me, the recordings, the shots, scenes, the equipment, the thoughts... which always reminded me of the song The Windmills of Your Mind and The Thomas Crown Affair and explains why I am left wanting to watch The Thomas Crown Affair after The Conversation.

c'mon dude, alienation and paranoia are funny, you've heard the Watergate tapes.

not as funny as the "Windmills of Your Mind" lyrics tho.

Remapping The Conversation: Urban Design and Industrial Reflexivity in Seventies San Francisco

...Though Union Square itself pre-dates modernist planning, the panoptic, bird's-eye perspective aligns the camera with the totalizing, top-down viewpoint that has been closely associated with modernism and what Martin Jay has called the "scopic regime" of modernity. From this opening sequence onwards, the planner's gaze of modernism is strongly associated with technologies of surveillance and control, and by extension, the potential erosion or disappearance of cohesive public space. The trope of the plan recurs several times during the film, particularly through the use of various maps and models, from the scale reproduction of Union Square that Harry Caul discovers at the wire-tappers' convention to the replica of the new downtown and waterfront in the Director's office (figs. 5 and 6). This trope consistently foregrounds the importance of the city to the structure of the film, and it also invokes the notion of planning and the planner's gaze figured in the opening scene. The selection of Union Square is significant too. In its urban design framework, the City Planning Department singled out Union Square as one of only three open public spaces remaining downtown and accordingly set out explicit principles for maintaining its character. Throughout the 1970s, attempts to redevelop buildings surrounding the square became the focal point of struggle between developers and the design panel. From this perspective, Union Square represents an older form of built environment threatened by the advance of urban renewal and corporate reconstruction.

http://post45.research.yale.edu/2014/06/remapping-the-conversation-urban-design-and-industrial-reflexivity-in-seventies-san-francisco/

Just read one music writer praise another music writer as such-and-such, and the words "Since when did William P. Moran of Detroit, Michigan, become 'pre-eminent in the field'?" immediately crossed my mind.

Still a marvellous romp.

romp? really? all singing, all dancing gloom and guilt?

Well, the red red robins do go romp-romp-romping along in it.

Brian De Palma interviewing Coppola in 1974 abt The Conversation:

https://cinephiliabeyond.org/francis-ford-coppola-brian-de-palma-conversation-two-great-filmmakers/

Thank you for sharing that. Great, very insightful interview.

Looking forward to reading that this weekend.

Thx for this! P fascinating

Was at a rep screening tonight. Noticed that Zodiac quotes a couple of bars from the score--makes perfect sense for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being the locale.

Close to a perfect film. The one line from Elizabeth MaCrae about how she bumps her head all the time and doesn't mind at all, that line always strikes me as a little off. Nothing else--and especially not how the key line is transformed.

The Blu Ray is classic; Harrison Ford screen test shot in the actual park, Coppola’s dictations of the script etc. Hours of extra fascinating bits.

"Noticed that Zodiac quotes a couple of bars from the score--makes perfect sense for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being the locale."

Well, actually the most obvious reason might be that it's the same composer...

I don't have the Blu-Ray, but a friend gave me a two-disc DVD--it's possible some of that stuff's on there.

I thought this revive might be about the facetime bug being a lot like the alleged phone bug in the movie.

Didn't know what you meant, so I looked it up...That's great; William P. Moran, new products for a new century.

Came across these two items, too. 1) Had no idea someone turned The Conversation into a play: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/theater/reviews/23conv.html. 2) This book, by one William B. Moran: http://www.amazon.ca/Covert-Surveillance-Electronic-Penetration-William/dp/0915179202.

RIP Allen Garfield

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRfJqmecqUQ

I got no time, Delbert--I got no time.

Wow Alan Garfield was fantastic in this; such a believable performance, a fine actor indeed. RIP.

Saw this on the big screen today. Definitely noticed the “cheat” in the crucial snatch of dialogue. I think it’s an excellent film with which I still have quite a few nitpicks

I'll stand by what I've said more than once on this thread: it's not a cheat if you accept that earlier in the film, you're hearing it through Harry's ears, hearing what he wants to hear, what allows him to take on the role of Cindy Williams' saviour.