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The Conversation [1974]
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Like watching paint dry
Review date: 2008-06-23 Rating: 2 out of 10
The slowest, dullest, most overrated (critics love it) movie I've ever sat through. At least watching paint dry isn't confusing. Dense, turgid, plodding repetition bury any seed of a plot there may have been. With an infuriatingly obtuse ending, thin, mumbled dialogue and baffling dream sequences, it is the only bad (no, TERRIBLE) film I've ever seen Gene Hackman in.
No doubt it is technically very good in terms of direction, a masterclass in acting technique, a superb character study etc. but it is horribly inaccessible, boringly indeed excessively layered, like some technically brilliant but esoterically contrived pretentious piece of avant-garde rubbish that the snobs/critics argue you're not supposed to "get".
If you fancy a bit of intelligent entertainment, give this dreadful movie the widest possible berth. If you want to be "challenged" try a Rubik's cube or mountaineering or something else designed to be challenging rather than entertaining. This tortuous film is strictly for the masochists.
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Reviews
Boring rubbish!
Review date: 2008-05-12 Rating: 2 out of 10
How do the people in these reviews justify giving this film such a high rating.Everyone has an opinion but to me classic 5 star films would be The Godfathers 1+2,The Shawshank Redemption and Carlito's Way,not this crap.The main reasons i bought it were because i rate Gene Hackman highly and from the reviews i had read about this Oscar nominee.
I had to turn it off 3/4s of the way through.It was sending me to sleep!
Inconsistancies or not
Review date: 2008-04-14 Rating: 10 out of 10
I enjoyed this immensely, despite some glaring inadequacies in the plot.
Blood in the toilet, this would surely set some alarms with the hotel management. Also, how did the couple manage to remove the body from the bedroom at the hotel without being detected. I cannot believe Harry would be so foolish and unproffesional as to have a party with rivals at his office or that he would be so easily taken in by the woman who stole the tapes, nor would he have accepted a pen from a rival who was demonstating bugging devices.
Nevertheless, the film was riviting, the acting supberb, the most re-watchable film I have viewed for a long time. Having rented it am now about to buy it. It rates very highly with me.
Another of those films that isn't really about its main plot
Review date: 2008-03-18 Rating: 8 out of 10
This is a film about a professional eavesdropper working on a case that proves to be maybe one job too far for him. A highly successful private surveillance technician is pulled in far deeper to a case than is healthy for him, and the movie soon becomes a study of him, rather than the case he is working on. The world of surveillance by means of bugging is a much lesser known one than that of camera surveillance, it somehow feels more specialised, even more technical and more nerdy perhaps, and I found it extremely interesting, even though much of the equipment would probably be obsolete by now - but the methods and the general cleverness of it all is probably just as relevant today.
Clearly inspired to some degree by Blow Up, this movie insists that the viewer is given little more than a tantalisng glimpse of the case at the core of the film and never makes this the main focus of the film, as a conventional thriller would. Just as this does for Blow Up, it makes The Conversation a movie you might like to see again just to look closer at some of the details you may have missed the first time, as the case is presented to us through the smokescreen that Harry is trying to clean up. It is assembled in the sort of way designed to get you thinking almost like a surveilance expert or private ear.
So much of this film works, the slow changing of emphasis from object to subject, as Harry himself becomes the main focus of the piece is quite brilliant, and Hackman is perfectly cast in the role. In this respect it is far more of a character study than Blow Up was, and is much more interested in the plight of the main character than the object of his research. Nor is it that much interested in making statements about subjective perceptions versus reality as is the former movie. This film goes far deeper into the psychological effects for the obsessive voyeur, and is almost Hitchcockian in its depiction of the fussy and meticulous analyst slowly being mentally unravelled by his own obsessive nature and his fragile conscience. It is interested in the moral aspect of doing such a job, of being a professional snoop, and asks questions like 'Just because your clients act respectably, wear nice suits, and pay up on time, does this really mean they are good the guys, and if they're not, then what does that make you?' Harry clearly struggles with this question as he begins to suspect he may indeed be working for disreputable people, a powerful group who want someone they don't like squashed.
The abstract ending is even better than that of Blow Up, and rounds off the movie beautifully, as it leaves us in no doubt that the true subject of the film was Harry, the increasingly disturbed martyr to his work. If you don't like movies that play with you a bit, and aren't really about the central plot of the film, then you may find this film annoying, just as many do with Blow Up. If however, you are up for a bit of film craft, a bit of being challenged to decide what the film is really about, and also an intriguing little mystery to solve at the core of the movie al la Blow Up, then this film is for you. I didn't enjoy it as much as the 60s Britflick, finding it no where near as cinematic, (although it is very well made) but I was intrigued by it, and enticed into wanting to watch it again. Nearly got five stars from me, but maybe it needed a bit more narrative movement in the middle instead of further exploring Harry's dour character. It's very good, extremely well acted and well crafted, but probably not a classic like Blow Up is, and this has to be, in my opinion, because it goes very firmly for filmic intelligence over cinematic charisma. This is not a flashy film, but more a mystery thriller for anoraks and movie officianados. It is adored by other film makers and critics and therefore you can find a fair bit written about it in the big movie guides.
Slow
Review date: 2008-02-17 Rating: 8 out of 10
The Conversation is the painfully slow, bleak study of electronic surveillance and threat of new technologies that is examined by the private and detached expert 'bugger' Gene Hackman. This conspiracy thriller is an effective character study that exposes the emerging conscience of an estranged eavesdropper whose work once resulted in the death of two people.
The timely, low-budget cinematic masterpiece of the mid 1970s was written, produced and directed by Coppola before and during the Watergate Scandal. This was a time of heightened concern over the violation of civil liberties.
The haunted surveillance expert (Gene Hackman), who pursues a case of marital infidelity, that demonstrates his rarified human emotion, discovers that he has become the victim of his own technological profession and intrigue by film's end.
Product Details/Specifications
Actor(s):
John Cazale
Cindy Williams
Gene Hackman
Frederic Forrest
Allen Garfield
Director(s):
Recording label: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainm
Manufacturer: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainm
EAN: 5017188812191
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 1
Format: PAL,
Release date: 2005-08-01
Number of discs: 1
Audience rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
Region code: 2
Running time: 108 minutes
Theatrical release date: 1974
Language: English (Original Language)