The Conversation(1974)
Paramount Pictures Apr 7, 1974 | Limited
A paranoid, secretive surveillance expert has a crisis of conscience when he suspects that the couple he is spying on will be murdered.
Releases
Original Release | Apr 7, 1974
2020 re-release (Rialto Pictures) | Mar 20, 2020
2021 Re-release (Rialto Pictures) | Jan 14, 2022
2022 Re-release (Rialto Pictures) | May 6, 2022
2024 Re-release (50th Anniversary) (Rialto Pictures) | Aug 9, 2024
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Box Office Results
All Releases (5)
$4,852,199
$26,175
$4,888,092
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Director & Top Cast
Technical Specifications
Sound Mix: Mono
Aspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1
Other Details
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Summaries
Plot Summary
- Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a prominent private surveillance expert in San Francisco, has been hired by the CEO (Robert Duvall, known throughout simply as the director) of a large, unnamed company to follow and record a conversation between the director's wife, Ann (Cindy Williams) and her suspected lover, Mark (Frederic Forrest), who's a major executive at the company. Using three separate microphones and two cameras, Harry and associates follow the couple on a seemingly casual walk in Union Square, where the director suspects they go to talk without, they think, the possibility of being surveilled. Later, in his lab, Harry laboriously reconstructs their conversation, which clearly indicates the two are in a relationship, which seems about to be consummated again the following Sunday at 3 pm at a room in the Jack Tar Hotel. He obsessively homes in on a particularly hard-to-hear sentence Mark whispers in Ann's ear, and eventually, with the aid of a complex state-of-the-art electronic board of his own invention, pieces together what Mark whispered: "He'd kill us if he had the chance."Harry is secretive and paranoid (not totally without reason). He alienates his assistant, Stan (John Cazale), because Harry won't teach him more about audio surveillance nor share the details of his cases, and his girlfriend, Amy (Teri Garr), because he won't open up to her. A deeply religious man, his guilt over a previous case he conducted for the U.S. Justice Department that resulted in the death of a mafia accountant and his wife and child makes him fear that his work will again lead to the death of innocents, and he refuses to deliver the tape or its contents to the director's assistant, Martin Stett (a very young Harrison Ford).Amy breaks up with Harry, and he goes off to attend a surveillance convention at which he's a featured guest. There he spots Martin, whom he accuses of following him. Martin says he's just delivering a message: give up the tape. Harry discovers that Stan has overnight gone to work for Bernie Moran (Alan Garfield), a Detroit-based surveillance-device inventor looking to acquire the rights to Harry's celebrated electronic surveillance inventions. Bernie demonstrates a device he sells that turns any telephone into a live remote microphone. Harry pooh-poohs the device to Stan, and persuades him to come back and work for him. He invites Moran, Stan, and four other friends from the convention back to his lab for a party. Moran's sexy (but aging) product demonstrator Meredith (Elizabeth McRae) flirts brazenly with Harry, and in a tëte-a-tëte outside the lab he opens up to her about his troubles with Amy. Back in the lab, Stan gets Harry to explain his sophisticated surveillance method for the Union Square conversation. Harry is drunk and exuberant, but his mood is broken when Bernie reveals that he successfully planted a pen mike on Harry and plays back the very private conversation with Meredith. Harry is outraged and kicks everybody out. Meredith stays and sleeps with him on the small bed in the lab. Harry dreams that he's pursuing Ann through fog, telling her about how he nearly died from a childhood disease and warning her that her husband plans to kill her. "I'm not afraid of death," he tells her as she disappears in the mist, "but I am afraid of murder."When Harry awakens in the morning, he discovers that Meredith is gone, along with the composite tape, and the original individual tapes. He tries unsuccessfully to reach the director from a pay phone, then hurries home. Harry has told everyone that he doesn't have a telephone and is shocked when Martin calls him right back. Martin tells him that it was he who hired Meredith to take the tapes, and that he's delivered them to the director. Martin instructs him to come to the corporate office to pick up his $15,000 cash fee. When Harry complies, he finds the director listening to the tape in disbelief, which is turning, as he feared, quickly to anger. The upset director curtly dismisses Harry, telling. him to "please go count your money somewhere else."At the appointed time, Harry goes to the Jack Tar Hotel assignation Ann and Mark mentioned, takes an adjoining room, and inserts a microphone through a hole he drills in the bathroom wall to listen in. He hears the director yelling at Ann, followed by confusing shouting, and rushes to the balcony, where he sees bloody hands slap up against the glass partition. Terrified, he collapses in his room, and falls asleep, curled up like a fetus. (Some commentators wondering about his unusual last name note that the gray, semi-transparent raincoat Harry Caul sports throughout the movie eerily resembles the caul, a membrane that protects a baby in the womb.) Upon reviving, he breaks into the room Mark and Ann had rented. The room has been completely cleaned and restored to rentable status. In the bathroom, he inspects the covered-with-a-"sanitized"-label toilet, and hesitantly lifts the lid. It's immaculate inside, to his visceral relief. But when he flushes it, bloody water wells up and gushes surreally and relentlessly onto the floor.Harry goes to see the director but is forcibly ejected by guards before he can even get past the first floor. On the street, he spies a waiting limo which he expects to be occupied by the director. But it's Ann inside. He passes a newspaper box and sees that the headline story reveals the death of the director in a car accident. Suddenly he revisualizes the central line from the conversation, "He'd kill us if he had the chance," and realizes that because of his sympathy for Ann and Mark, he'd misapplied his modulator to emphasize the word "kill", and suppress the real emphasis that was on the word "us". The whisper wasn't about Mark's fears, but was instead a justification for the director's planned murder that they had been finalizing in the conversation.Ann now controls the company. Later, as Ann, Mark and Martin try to escape reporters pestering them about the director's death and the company's future, they spot Harry in the crowd. He runs.Back in his apartment, Harry sits and stews, and goes into his habitual form of meditation, playing a saxophone in accompaniment to a jazz record. His phone rings, but no one seems to be on the other end. He hangs up and resumes playing. It rings again; this time Martin is on the other end and warns him that he, Ann and Mark know that he has figured out what happened, and that they will be watching him. Martin then plays back a recording of Harry's record and sax playing from seconds before. Harry methodically tears apart his apartment looking for the bug, which he can't unearth (even in the phone, à la Bernie's device). He may be a widely celebrated surveillance expert, but he's got nothing on these guys. Exhausted, he resignedly goes back to playing his sax amidst the ruins of his apartment.
Storyline
- Harry Caul is a devout Catholic and a lover of jazz music who plays his saxophone while listening to his jazz records. He is a San Francisco-based electronic surveillance expert who owns and operates his own small surveillance business. He is renowned within the profession as being the best, one who designs and constructs his own surveillance equipment. He is an intensely private and solitary man in both his personal and professional life, which especially irks Stan, his business associate who often feels shut out of what is happening with their work. This privacy, which includes not letting anyone into his apartment and always telephoning his clients from pay phones is, in part, intended to control what happens around him. His and Stan's latest job (a difficult one) is to record the private discussion of a young couple meeting in crowded and noisy Union Square. The arrangement with his client, known only to him as "the director", is to provide the audio recording of the discussion and photographs of the couple directly to him alone in return for payment. Based on circumstances with the director's assistant, Martin Stett, and what Harry ultimately hears on the recording, Harry believes that the lives of the young couple are in jeopardy. Harry used to be detached from what he recorded, but is now concerned ever since the deaths of three people that were the direct result of a previous audio recording he made for another job. Harry not only has to decide if he will turn the recording over to the director, but also if he will try and save the couple's lives using information from the recording. As Harry goes on a quest to find out what exactly is happening on this case, he finds himself in the middle of his worst nightmare. — Huggo Harry Caul is a surveillance expert who can bug people at anytime and anywhere. Living in a isolated world, his business is his work. One day, he records a young couple, having a conversation in a park in San Francisco. When he finally is able to pierced together the entire recording, he soon realizes that there's something definitely with this couple's conversation, Fearing that they are being targeted by someone who wants them dead, Caul races against time to figured out the truth before the couple get assassinated by whoever is behind this murder plot. As his investigation leads him deeper to the revelation, his relationship with fellow colleague, who he works for, and his closest friends started to deteriorate. Soon, Caul find himself entrapped in a world where the truth is far more deceiving than what it seems to be. — blazesnakes9 Undoubtedly, guilt-ridden Harry Caul, a solitary San Francisco surveillance expert devoted to neutrality, is at the top of his game. Playing his cards close to the chest, Caul undertakes the routine task of monitoring the conversations of a young couple in San Francisco's bustling Union Square, unaware that a shocking truth hides in plain sight. As Harry assembles a master tape containing crucial evidence, his dormant conscience awakes, and subtle hints of murder send him spiralling into a sinister web of secrecy, paranoia, and self-destruction. Is there, indeed, something horrible underneath the conversation? — Nick Riganas
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