Movie Ramble: The Conversation (1974)

You've of course heard of Westerns, Thrillers, Romantic Comedies, Satires, Dramas. You've also heard of Buddy Movies, Road Trip Movies, Quirky Indie Movies, and Cross-Genre Mashups. To these I'd like to add a sub- sub-genre: the Sensitive Voyeur Flick.

Far from making fun of these movies, I think they're actually some of my favorite films. Hitchcock's "Rear Window" is still my all-time number one. One of most engrossing movies in recent memory was "The Lives of Others" (2006), written and directed by a man with the most uber-German name in modern history: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. And now I've seen the film that undoubtedly influenced him, "The Conversation."

Haven't heard of "The Conversation"? I hadn't, and I can't imagine why. It was directed by Francis Ford Coppola between Godfathers I and II. It stars Gene Hackman. It includes a corporate punky-looking Harrison Ford in a creepy supporting role. And it's a fantastic flick that adds weight to the idea that the '70s might just have been the true Golden Age of Film.

What these three films share is a particular kind of protagonist: the unhappy man who cruelly eavesdrops on other people until he suddenly begins to care about them. L.B. Geoffries is laid up in his Chelsea apartment, trying passive-aggressively to avoid the bounds of marriage, when he starts to wonder what happened to the neighbor's wife. Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler spies for the East German Stasi when he starts to care about the welfare of a renegade writer he's supposed to send to prison. Harry Caul cleverly records a couple's conversation on a San Francisco square (for a client known Orwellianly as The Director), then tries to thwart the murder he suspects will happen based on the evidence he has unearthed.

Surprisingly, "The Conversation" is in many ways the most restrained of the three. Jimmy Stewart's character is actually a pretty happy-go-lucky photographer who stumbles into his voyeurism and uses it to discover his real love for Grace Kelley (what the hell took him so long?). Ulrich Muhe spends stoic hours with the headphones on, but his character transformation is actually fairly traditional.

Hackman's Harry Caul is hard to peg. He's stoic, of course. He's (fittingly) obsessed with his own privacy. But it's not exactly clear what causes his change. It's not that he falls in love with the woman in jeopardy. It's a larger raising of conscience and consciousness, climaxing in a unique way when he realizes that that he's now being spied on, and he destroys his own apartment in a futile attempt to find the bug.

All of these films work because thematically, they exist in a mirrors-upon-mirrors world in which voyeurs (we) watch other voyeurs. As the protagonists begin to care about their spy subjects, we begin to care about the voyeurs. And as our daily lives seem more and more to be exercises in a two-steps-removed human existence, these films resonate like never before.