The Conversation movie review (1974)
“Who’s interested in these people, anyway?” Stan asks. One of Harry’s crosses is that Stan is irreverent about their work, which to Harry is a sacred calling. Later we find out who’s interested: Harry has been hired by the director of a large corporation (Robert Duvall), although at first he deals only with the man’s assistant (Harrison Ford). It becomes clear that Ann, the young woman, is the director’s wife, and Mark, the young man, is her lover. But what will happen next? “He’d kill us if he had the chance,” says Mark. Will he? Harry plays the tapes back and forth, juggling a bank of three tape recorders, in a scene Coppola says was partly inspired by the photographer trying to coax the truth out of his prints in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up.” Snatches of conversation advance and recede, maddeningly mixed with a band in the plaza that’s playing “Red, Red Robin.”
Harry is impatient with Stan, impatient with everyone. At home, he’s shocked to find that his landlord entered his apartment, knows it is his birthday, and knows how old he is. On the phone, the landlord explains he needs his own key for an emergency. “I’d be perfectly happy if all my personal things burnt up in a fire,” Harry tells him, “because I don’t have anything personal. Nothing of value--only my key.” He visits his mistress Amy (Teri Garr). She knows it’s him from the way he thinks he comes quietly through the door. She asks him to share something personal with her.
“I don’t have any secrets,” he says.
“I’m a secret,” she says.
The best supporting performance is by Allen Garfield, as Moran, Harry’s successful competitor. At a trade show, Harry discovers that Stan has left him and gone to work for Moran. Yet he recklessly invites Moran, Stan and a crowd back to his office, an area behind steel mesh in an otherwise empty warehouse. He is humiliated to discover Moran bugged him, and of course later that night is betrayed by the hooker. A nightmare gives key information: As a child, Harry was paralyzed on one side, and nearly drowned during a bath. The word “Caul” has two meanings, both relevant: It is a spider’s web, and the membrane that encloses a fetus. If it is found on a child’s head after birth, we learn, “it is supposed to protect against drowning.”
