The Conversation

When one thinks of the great movies of the seventies and there were many The Conversation does not often come to mind. In fact this was not even a movie I was aware of until recently when it appeared in reference to a few other movies that I have watched.

The Conversation was the baby of Francis Ford Coppola. Fresh off his Godfather success Coppola wrote, produced, and directed this psychological thriller starring Gene Hackman.

Hackman plays Harry Caul a surveillance expert who according to one of his peers is " the best bugger on the West Coast." Through the movie we learn that a recording that Caul did years ago led the deaths of a rat in the Teamsters union as well as that mans family. He lives with that guilt. Most of what he does in his career are of the typical insurance scam, cheating spouses sort of thing but as the movie begins we see Caul and his crew performing a unique surveillance.

Two people Bernie Moran, played by Frederic Forest and a woman known only as Ann, played by Cindy Williams, yes that Cindy Williams of Laverne and Shirley fame, are walking around a public square having a conversation. The Conversation is about that conversation and it's effects on all the people. John Cazale plays Caul's assistant. Cazale soon on his way to dieing of cancer and fresh off his role as Frodo in The Godfather was, even in a small role, magnificent.

Hackman again plays an everyman. This is not some suave, debonair, spy. This is a rumpled, balding, eyeglass wearing, everyman who lives in a small nondescript apartment, obsessed with privacy and security and who when he gets home the first thing he does is take off his pants and spend his evening in his boxers. No Harry Caul will never be confused with James Bond.


When preparing the tapes for his buyer Caul becomes concerned that these tapes may lead to someone's murder. Hearing Bernie say to Laurie as they walk around the square that " he would kill us if he could" he becomes sure that his client might do just that. With his past experience this sends Harry into a state of controlled panic. What we learn as the movie progresses is that what you think you hear is often not what you hear and the results of misinterpretation are sometimes much more severe than one might think.

Also starring in this movie are a young Terri Carr and an even younger Harrison Ford along with an uncredited performance by Robert Duvall. Still the movie is Hackman's from beginning to end, a tour de force performance, with Hackman a little more out there than his normal role.


Not quite the movie I expected but certainly one that I would reccomend.

Dog Day Afternoon

This 1975 movie is based on the real events surrounding a bank robbery in August, 1972 in Brooklyn. Al Pacino and John Cazale play Sonny and Sal two losers attempting to commit the robbery. It is a comedy of errors from the beginning. Their third accomplice quits just as the robbery starts so that are forced to let him leave just after they have taken control of the bank. This leaves us with the scene of Sonny letting him out of the bank whose doors have been locked and then getting him to leave the keys to the getaway car.

Sonny has worked at banks before so he knows some of the tricks that might be attempted to foil the robbery, unfortunately he has never committed a robbery before and his inexperience clearly manifests itself. The bank had a deposit pickup shortly before his arrival, he had been counting on a drop off, and this leaves him with just over $1000 cash. He decides to steal the travelers checks but then to not allow these to be traced he decides to burn the register in a trash can. This causes smoke to billow inside the building and alerts a neighborhood barber to call the police.

From there Sonny has to negotiate his way out. This character is one of Pacino's best. He is intensely, if not likaable, at least sympathetic. This was not what he wanted and he clearly did not really understnad the ramifications.

We later learn that one of the motives for the robbery was to gain money so that his male lover, or wife as he calls him, named Leon needs a sex change operation. Sonny is also married to a woman and has two kids. Surely Sonny has alot on his plate. When the movie was released Sonny was an antihero as he raged about Attica and garnered the support of raucous crowds behind the police barricades.

John Cazale plays Sal as an understated almost mute man who lets Sonny do the leading, in fact you get the sense that he has been led into this by nothing more than the volume of Sonny's personality. Sal is a religeois man who considers his body a temple and chastizes one of the hostages from smoking as " your body is a temple." This is especially powerful as we know that Cazale died less than five years later of mestatsized lung cancer.

Charles Durning plays the police detective negotiating with Sal and he is wonderful in this role, perhaps epitomizing by trying to hold the crime scene together how crazy the whole city of New York was in that turbulent time.

This is a period peice, certainly without knowledge of how crazy the seventies were, especially in New York City, the movie loses some of its appeal but taken and understood with the right backdrop this movie is powerful and the ending cannot help but leave one a little shook.

A movie whose characters stay with you, considered one of recently passed director Sidney Lumet's best.

The Deer Hunter

I watched this movie this week. It was a movie that allows you have to have different opinions about it. Robert De Niro was wonderful in it. Christopher Walken was very good, a far cry from some of his less serious roles of late.

A young Meryl Streep is beautiful and subdued in her role. Reading the backstory one cannot help but center on John Cazale. After playing Frodo in the Godfather movies his place in movie lore is assured. In this movie he sealed it by despite having end stage lung cancer which had moved to his bones she chose to take this role. Meryl Streep,his fiance at the time joined him in the movie was the woman caught between Walken and De Niro.

The movie told in 4 scenes goes between Vietnam and Clairton, Pennsylvania. The main characters, all Russian Americans are all affected in some way by the war.

The movie won Best Picture and while I liked the movie that seems extreme. The Vietnam scenes, and extended scenes of forced Russian roulette were extreme then and are extreme now. Walken's character Christoper, after going AWOL gets sucked into the gambling scene in a fallen Saigon and that seems a little off from the rest of the believability of the movie.

For me however the most memorable scene is the last scene. After the funeral for Christopher the characters are having coffee around a table. Cazale, whose scenes were filmed first as he was literally at deaths door, is seated next to Streep while the characters somberly reflect on the loss of their friend. In the movie the characters did not interact much so this seating must be on purpose. As a final gesture to the real life couple who would soon be facing Cazale's death. This and this alone makes this movie memorable.