The Conversation is remarkably ambitious and serious—a Hitchcockian thriller, a first-rate psychological portrait of a distinctive modern villain (a professional eavesdropper) and a bitter attack on American business values, all in one movie. I feel that Coppola has partially botched the thriller, but the film is a triumph none the less—gritty, complex, idiosyncratic….

The Conversation, which is about a man rather like Watergate bugger James McCord, profits from the great American national uproar over privacy and illegal surveillance. But Coppola claims that he began writing the screenplay for The Conversation in 1966, years before such things became national issues, so let us call his timeliness prescient rather than lucky. Timeliness isn't necessarily a sign of triviality in an artist; it may be a sign of good instinct, an ability to connect personal concern with national obsession. I think Coppola may become this sort of non-exploitative 'public' artist, a kind of cinematic Dickens (all proportions kept).

There's no doubt that he develops his protagonist, Harry Caul …, with a Dickensian richness of eccentricity, an extension of spiritual condition into physical metaphor. The conception is audacious and aggressively paradoxical…. We soon realise that Harry suffers from an extreme desolation of the spirit, a nearly pathological loneliness and guilt; his insistence on 'privacy' is just a way of keeping people at a distance. Repressed, awkward, terrified of his own powers and feelings, he cannot bear the demands people make on him, any demands. (p. 131)

Coppola's paradox grows in power and wit as its logic becomes clear. Poor Harry is so fearful, so given over to obsession, that he begins spying on himself. Before entering his mistress's door he hides outside, 'casing' the apartment; since it's clear that she has not been unfaithful, who is he casing but himself, a man caught red-handed in the act of visiting his mistress?…

Against his will, Harry has become part of a murder plot; when he discovers that his own apartment has been bugged by the plotters, he rips it to pieces, tearing up the walls, the floor, the furniture in a fruitless search for the microphone. The insane logic of Harry's obsession has thus been fulfilled: the bugger gets bugged, the man with only his privacy to protect destroys his possessions and winds up guarding literally nothing—an empty space, a cavity sealed with locks. The American mania for 'home security' here reaches its comic apotheosis. Our last view of Harry is very sad: he sits alone in the wreckage playing a saxophone along with a jazz record—halfway into life, halfway out. We're left with little doubt that the stasis is permanent. (p. 132)

Indeed, Harry Caul would like to operate as efficiently and impersonally as any other professional. He would like to think of his victims as anonymous 'targets', to lose himself in the delightful technical intricacies of robbing them without regard for what he is stealing or what they might feel about it.

The movie is an angry, funny attack on this sort of thinking, which Coppola sees as a natural product of American business values and our eternal boyish enthusiasm for technology as an end in itself. Stealing privacy has become part of the American way of life, and to make the point clear Coppola sends Harry to a San Francisco convention of security experts and equipment manufacturers, at which evil, destructive but undeniably ingenious little spying gadgets are hawked and sold like kitchen appliances or motorboats…. In The Godfather, also, the most extreme and fantastic behaviour was shown to emerge from a setting of normality—family life. Coppola seems to relish the more bizarre American contradictions, the clash between context and substance, between the style of an act (banal) and its meaning (horrifying).

Although he is drawn to extreme behaviour, Coppola's style of representation remains straightforwardly realistic. That's why his films may not at first appear to be the work of an artist. His attitudes and personality emerge not so much from the camera style as from the behaviour on screen. For instance, he has a genius for shallow, noisy, self-propelling types—the American as untrammelled egotist, powerful and infantile at the same time. He appears to love their theatrical energy and flash, and his sense of how such people reveal themselves in social situations is so accurate that he can do very funny, outrageous scenes without a trace of caricature. (Much of The Godfather, of course, was extremely funny.)

In The Conversation, Coppola has a savagely good time with Harry's surveillance colleagues. Boastful, frenetic, absurdly aggressive, these American go-getters can't stop competing for a moment, not even at a party, and so they begin showing off and playing dirty tricks on one another…. The surveillance experts are hideously funny and also tragic; looking at them it's hard for an American not to think of soldiers testing weapons in Vietnam and other examples of professionals run amuck. By immersing himself in a particular, idiosyncratic corner, accurately perceived, Coppola has made contact with a major strain in American life, a malaise that persists through generations. His unresolved love-hate relationship with the characters makes the bitterness of his criticism acceptable; if he entirely hated them, the film would have collapsed into diatribe, and we would have rejected his attitudes out of hand.

In a long, fascinating sequence, Harry reconstructs on tape the lovers' conversation as they walk slowly around a crowded San Francisco square…. As Harry mixes the separate tracks together, perfecting the aural image, we actually see the conversation; and it occurs to us that Harry is reconstructing and perfecting life—or at least a simulacrum of it. Of course film-making is also a reconstruction of life, and it's tempting to view The Conversation's attack on irresponsible professionalism as also an implied attack on certain kinds of irresponsible filmmaking—empty, technically perfect work in which beautiful images are the director's only achievement; art without feeling or bite. (pp. 132-33)

Did Coppola intend The Conversation as a critical commentary on Blow-Up, a way of showing how that kind of story could be done? (He started work on the screenplay the year Blow-Up was completed.) The similarity is suggestive; both films centre on technological voyeurism and irresponsibility, and Harry's work with the tape parallels the famous sequence in which the fashion photographer discovers a murder by repeatedly cropping and blowing up a photograph….

Coppola has rescued the story from 'art'. He places his alienated man in a recognisable American business/social world, and the details and mood seem intuitively right, making emotional contact in a way that Antonioni's awkward, vaguely metaphorical use of swinging London commonplaces did not. Moreover, Coppola is far too interested in Harry to allow this sad technological wizard to become an example of modern man's inability to feel or communicate or any rot like that. Contradictory, stubbornly eccentric, intensively imagined as a particular kind of human futility, Harry could never inspire any such banal interpretation…. [He] is anything but emotionally dead (that cliché of 'advanced' film-making)—he's inarticulate because he feels too much and too incoherently, immobile because every possible road of conduct becomes an imagined disaster. Participating in life is an agony for such a man; therefore whether he acts or fails to act, we are drawn to him emotionally.

Unfortunately, after all the suspense build-up, the repeated playing of the tape, etc., Coppola never satisfies our curiosity about the mystery itself. Limited to what Harry knows, we never quite understand what is going on, and some of this confusion could have been avoided with a little extra exposition…. Murder mysteries are often full of … loopholes, but we generally don't notice them—the pacing is too fast. The Conversation's slow, repetitive, accumulative method forces us to review what we know, like a detective building a case, and the narrative sloppiness becomes irritating. Worst of all, the surprise denouement, in which the victims and murderers get reversed and Harry realizes that he has been used even more viciously than he had thought, occurs so quickly and casually that we can hardly take it in. I sympathise with Coppola's dilemma. A confrontation between Harry and the young couple might have straightened things out easily enough, but by presenting Harry with an actual physical threat (as Hitchcock did to his voyeur in Rear Window) Coppola would have turned The Conversation into a more conventional melodrama. He sticks to the internal and psychological threat, thereby losing a part of his audience at the end—an honourable failure. (p. 133)