The Conversation, a review by Antares
The Conversation (1974)
68/100 - Nothing drives me more crazy than when a director plays the audience for a bunch of suckers, and that's exactly what Francis Ford Coppola does with
The Conversation. The film starts out rather dry, but still intriguing as we are given insight into the covert world of surveillance and eavesdropping. It is here where the film really shines. But halfway through, it kind of loses steam and only comes back to life at the very end. Now I can forgive a film that lags a bit if the payoff makes up for it. But the payoff here is a bit of manipulation by Coppola that defies the laws of science.
Videotape and audiotape do not lie, unless it is manipulated. Inflection or accentuation does not change over time on a piece of tape. Harry Caul is an expert, and he listens to these tapes and hears one particular sentence uttered by one of the people he's been paid to eavesdrop on. The man, Mark, utters the line He'd kill us if he got the chance. to Ann with the accent on the first two words of the sentence, implying that the woman's husband would kill them if he knew of their affair. This line is heavily scrutinized throughout the film by Caul, as he faces the dilemma of turning over the tapes to the husband, fearing that the husband will carry out what the couple fear. Mark also mentions a rendezvous at a hotel and Caul goes to the hotel and rents the adjacent room. He hears an argument next door and sees a shadow of what he perceives to be Ann being murdered on a frosted glass partition between his balcony and theirs. Caul returns to his warehouse office and goes back over the tape of the conversation, and lo and behold, the sentence He'd kill us if he got the chance., now sounds completely different as the accentuation is now on the third word Us, which implies that the couple has to murder the husband first, before he finds out about them. BULLSHIT...BULLSHIT...BULLSHIT!!! Sound does not change over the course of a few days when registered on audiotape.
This is just a cheap way to trick the audience, and a lazy way to show that you really didn't have much of a story in the first place, so you had to resort to this kind of cheap carny trick. The minute it happened I felt as if I had just been duped by a crooked Three Card Monty dealer. I thought about giving this a much lower rating, but the first hour is rather good and of course, the sound in this film is excellent. But when all is said and done, this film for me, is not worthy of the lofty position it is given by many in the film world.
What the color coding means...
Teal = Masterpiece
Dark Green = Classic or someday will be
Lime Green = A good, entertaining film
Orange = Average
Red = Cinemuck
Brown = The color of crap, which this film is(From Antares' Short Summations on August 16th, 2012)
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July 11, 2025, 08:22:50 AM
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