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Title: The Conversation (1974)
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| Complete credited cast: | |||
| Gene Hackman | ... | ||
| John Cazale | ... | ||
| Allen Garfield | ... |
Bernie Moran
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| Frederic Forrest | ... | ||
| Cindy Williams | ... | ||
| Michael Higgins | ... |
Paul
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| Elizabeth MacRae | ... |
Meredith
(as Elizabeth Mac Rae)
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| Teri Garr | ... |
Amy
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| Harrison Ford | ... | ||
| Mark Wheeler | ... |
Receptionist
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Robert Shields | ... |
The Mime
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Phoebe Alexander | ... |
Lurleen
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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 ... Written by Huggo
"The Conversation" is the single most boring movie, out of thousands, that I have ever seen.
Critics and fans praise it as a classic. These critics and fans should be arrested, booked, and sentenced.
I would like to stick a pin in the fans of this movie, to see if their blood is green.
There needs to be a new word to identify the level of boredom this movie induces. I had flashbacks of something I hadn't thought of in years: being a small child, sitting in a class I hated, taught by an inept oaf, on a beautiful spring day, my eyes glued to the clock, waiting for each tick of its second hand, straining to will that hand to move, and fearing that time had somehow thickened, like molasses, and slowed, and would never move again.
I had to watch this movie for a writing assignment. Had I been able to, not only would I have stopped watching it after thirty minutes, no matter the rave reviews, I would have performed exorcising ablutions on the DVD player.
I must immediately watch a good movie -- to get back on the horse once again, as it were. Otherwise, I might never be able to watch another movie again.
My Deity! The pretension, the acting class exercises, the shallow take on human nature, the excruciating slowness of the camera movies, the cheapness and phoniness of the dishonest, tarted-up, "surprise" rip-off ending, the utter implausibility, the complete refusal to provide anything so simple as a compelling plot or even one bit of action.
Russian playwright Anton Chekhov famously said that you don't introduce a gun in act one if you aren't ready to use it by act three. The application of that famous quote to "The Conversation"? Had Chekhov lived to see this movie, he might have shot the filmmaker. And I'd testify in Chekhov's defense.
No, not really. The Chekhovian point is that the basic elements of this movie: an emotionally frozen surveillance man, the couple he's spying on, an older, powerful man interested in the couple -- could have been used to make a brilliant movie. In fact, they were used to make a brilliant movie: Florian Henckel von Donnersmark's "The Lives of Others." "The Conversation" isn't a movie; it's a diabolical form of torture. Its star, Gene Hackman, gives better performances as the voice-over for Lowe's Hardware Stores commercials.
That critics and fans have been touting this overrated, self-serious, naked emperor for the past thirty plus years is a mark of shame to the film community, far outstripping previous scandals from the Fatty Arbuckle trial to the latest African adoption. This movie, much more than "Celebrity Jeopardy" skits on "Saturday Night Live," is a damning indictment of some celebrities' IQs.