If Popeye Doyle (The French Connection) is all gut instinct and brute force, Harry Caul is the exact opposite — cautious, meticulous, afraid of his own shadow. And yet, in The Conversation, Gene Hackman proves he doesn’t need action to command a film. He plays Harry as a man so tightly wound he barely seems to breathe, a surveillance expert whose job is to listen but whose life is defined by silence.
What makes Hackman’s performance so brilliant is how subtly he lets us see the cracks in Harry’s carefully controlled world. His colleagues think he’s a genius, but we quickly realize how bad he is at his job. He gets his tapes stolen, his triple-locked apartment is easily broken into, and his phone number isn’t as private as he thinks. The irony is crushing: A man obsessed with protecting his own privacy is constantly being watched, manipulated, and undone by others.
As a result, Harry is afraid to connect with people, afraid to spill any information about himself, and has little to no personal life. Yet he is still frequently found, his private information routinely spilled. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, this 1974 film — written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola — nails what it feels like to be constantly under surveillance and have no real protection from technology. The film has aged well.
But what truly haunts Harry isn’t professional failure — it’s guilt. Hackman plays him like a man drowning in his own past, burdened by the knowledge that his work has cost lives. In the confessional scene, when he stumbles through his sins before finally admitting, “I’ve been involved in some work that I think will be used to hurt these two young people,” Hackman delivers this line with the hesitation of someone who has spent years convincing himself he’s not to blame. Yet, it illustrates the most devastating moments in this man’s life.
By the film’s end, when Harry has torn apart his own apartment in paranoia, saxophone wailing in the background, we’re left with one of the bleakest images in 1970s cinema: a man who has built his life around control, now utterly powerless. Unlike Doyle, who thrives on chaos, Harry is destroyed by it. And Hackman, in this performance, shows us just how terrifying that unraveling can be.
The Conversation is showing at SBIFF’s Film Center (916 State St. in Downtown Santa Barbara) April 4-17, as part of The Hackman Connection program in honor of the recently deceased actor. See sbifftheatres.com/gene-hackman for showtimes.
