Kinematoscope

Do you ever feel like someone is listening in on you? That's because they probably are. And as today's entry The Conversation will demonstrate, it was possible to listen to people talking virtually anywhere at anytime in 1974 using equipment that appears comically outdated to our iPhone and Blackberry adjusted eyes. Just imagine all the various wiretaps, microchips, satellites, and other indicators of the coming robot war that could be monitoring your every word these days!

The Key Players:

Our director is a gent named Francis Ford Coppola, who made this film in between two other films that are about the father of god or some nonsense like that. I'll let you know when we get to them in a long, long time.

Gene Hackman is of course a star of the silver screen that will State your Enemies, Burn your Mississippis, Tide your Crimsons, Royal any Tenenbaums you may have, and give you a good Hoosiering any day of the week. He's got two Oscars gathering dust on his mantle for The French Connection and Unforgiven.

The only other real notable in the cast is a very young Harrison Ford.



Click for More...

The Story:

Our story centers nearly entirely on the life and mind of Harry Caul (Hackman) a fastidious and reserved surveillance expert. The films opens with Caul and some hired help recording everything a couple says while walking around a crowded park square- they accomplish this by means of long distance microphones and handheld recording devices right next to them.

The job, which only Caul could've had the wherewithal to accomplish, is done, and Caul goes to hand the tape over to the CEO that commissioned it, only to find the man out and his aggresively polite assistant (Ford) all-too willing to take the tape meant for the CEO's eyes only.

Caul decides to return later, but obsesses about the tape. The girl, clearly the CEO's wife, seems to be having an affair with the man walking in the park with her. Caul fiddles with the three audio sources until he hears the man say: "He'd kill us if he had the chance."

Caul goes to a local security convention as a featured guest (where he brings some associates back to his workshop, basking in his relative celebrity among surveillance specialists). He reveals to a groupie (apparently there were surveillance groupies in 1974- who knew?) that he once made a tape that led to a man and his wife and child being killed.

Clearly the weight of that has led to his reticence and perfectionism, and the connection to the current case is clear. If he turns the tape over, will the couple be killed as well?

Alas, the floozie seduces him (apparently his balding, nearly incommunicative magnetism was irresistable) and when he awakes the tapes have been stolen!

He goes to receive his payment from the clearly irate CEO, as the assistant ambiguously looks on. That afternoon, knowing that the couple mention a meeting at a hotel on the tape, he rents the room next door and listens in. He hears yelling! And the tape being played! Then crashes!

He goes to the balcony and sees a hand smear blood on the window, and begns hyperventillating in fear- clearly his nightmare is replaying itself and he's caused more deaths.

Or has he?

The Artistry:

The Conversation is a very slow, deliberate film, made by a director clearly in epic film mode, even for a more fleeting thriller plot. It opens with a minutes-long aerial shot of the park, unclear initially where our focus is meant to be placed until it follows Hackman.

For a slow, silent movie, it delves into Caul's psyche more than I expected, showing us his absolute devotion to privacy and method- he plays the saxophone along to jazz recors in perfect sync, and only makes calls on pay phones (despite owning a phone). David Shire's atonal piano score helps underscore Caul's isolation from the world.

Coppola, inspired by the themes of Antonioni's Blowup, wanted to make a film about observation versus particpation and perception versus reality- it was just dumb luck, as it turned out, that the Watergate scandal and revelations of illegal wiretapping very similar to the film broke months before its release. Many people saw The Convesation as a reaction to the Nixon Administration's transgressions, but the script was completed in the mid-sixties.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

Caul wakes up, and breaks into the next room to find no blood on the window, no bodies, nothing. But then the toilet backs up and blood comes spilling out, and he flees in a panic.

He goes to confront the CEO, only to have his entire perception flipped- it's CEO who is now dead, the wife who inherits control of the company, and the man from the park by her side.

Caul rapidly rethinks what he has seen and heard- the blood on the window could have been the CEO's as the man killed him, the line on the tape could have been "He'd kill us if he had the chance."

He gets a call from the assistant (who may or may not have been in on it the entire time) on his home phone somehow, and he ominously warns Caul not to tell anyone what he knows- he then proves that Caul's impenetrable apartment has been bugged by replaying Caul's own saxophone practice over the line, and says "We'll be listening."

Caul then systematically destroys his entire apartment, furniture, floorboards, mini-statue of the madonna and all, looking for bugs, but finds nothing. The film ends with Caul playing his saxphone, unaccompanied, in his stripped bare apartment.

END SPOILERS


Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

It seems properly placed to me, in the low 200s- a good film with some timeless (if technologically dated) motifs, but not quite the engaging story of brilliant performances to push it to the top.

The Legacy:

In addition to three Oscar nominations (for Sound, Screenplay, and Picture), it won the Golden Palm at Cannes that year, and has been preserved in the NFR.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Not much to choose from, but here's the ending with Hackman ripping up his apartment. Spoilers, I guess:



Leftover Thoughts:

-Caul also has a mistress (or something) that he pays to put up in her own apartment (I think) but visits only sporadically and never opens up to. It was hard to get jazzed about it, since he's not a terribly engaging character to begin with.

-Here's a confession: Coppola's rhythm puts me to sleep. I can't watch his films when I'm tired, it's bad news (even those films about those Italian dudes in suits).

Coming Up...

Thursday, September 10th: Ed Wood

Tuesday, September 15th: Letters From Iwo Jima

Today we steadily progress in the countdown with a film that launched the "New Hollywood" era, glorified a pair of two-bit grocery-store robbers that had no larger legacy (like John Dillinger managed on his own), and set new standards of acceptable screen sex and violence: a 1967 number called Bonnie and Clyde.

The Key Players:

Our maestro is Arthur Penn, director of the celebrated The Miracle Worker, the westerns The Left Handed Gun and Little Big Man, as well as the feature-film adaptation of Arlo Guthrie's famous song Alice's Restaurant.

Producer and star Warren Beatty had already made a name for himself in Splendor In The Grass before headlining this picture. A storied career followed- Beatty has been nominated for fourteen Oscars of various types, winning one statue for directing his communist epic Reds. Beatty was the real driving force behind Bonnie and Clyde in his role as producer, hiring Penn and screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton and receiving 40% of the final gross (which Warner Brothers had thought would amount to very little).

Faye Dunaway, making her second countdown appearance, has had a career that extends far beyond winning an Oscar for annoying the crap out of me in Network: from the highs of The Thomas Crown Affair and Barfly to the lows of Mommie Dearest and a cameo in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair.

Gene Hackman co-stars, but we'll discuss him at length in future posts, and Estelle Parsons won an Oscar for Supporting Actress for her work in this film.



Click for More...

The Story:

A simplified version of history, as Bonnie Parker (Dunaway) spots Clyde Barrow (Beatty) trying to steal her mother's car in the driveway, and brazenly yells at him while wearing no clothes.

An immediate bond forms, as Clyde tells Bonnie he robs banks, and produces a gun- intrigued, she strokes the muzzle (I am informed this is pretty risque for 1967), but doubts he's telling the truth. So he robs a grocery store right at that moment, and they hit the road in a stolen car (after finally learning one another's names).

They embark on their fabled, meandering crime spree through rural Texas. The first bank they hit has actually gone under three weeks before (a nod to the Depression setting), but they get by squatting in foreclosed houses and robbing whatever gas stations, grocers, and banks they come across. They pick up a teenage protege, C. W. Moss during a job.

Eventually they meet up with Clyde's brother Buck (Hackman) and his wife Blanche (Parsons). Buck gets along with everyone, but Blanche, the obvious square of the bunch, and Bonnie detest one another immediately.

The gang has a few run-ins with the law- in an early bank heist, Moss inexplicably starts parallel-parking the getaway car, delaying the escape and leading to Clyde shooting the bank-manager in the face through the car window (in a very oddly-framed shot). Another time, they tie up and humiliate a Texas Ranger named Frank Hamer who has pursued them across the border into Oklahoma.

After a long time on the run, Bonnie implores Clyde to let her visit her family. In another scene, the power-happy gang take a couple hostage (Gene Wilder in his screen debut, and the improbably-named Evans Evans) and chatter with them like friends, only to abruptly kick them out of the car when Bonnie dislikes that the man is an undertaker.

Eventually Frank Hamer (who has magically transformed into a coldly efficient lawman) catches up with them, and various gunfights ensue: finally Buck is shot in the head, while Blanche is blinded by shattering glass. Bonnie, Clyde and C. W. make a hasty retreat as Clyde's brother dies on the grass surrounded by police, marking an abrupt shift in the tone of the film.

The Artistry:

As landmark as it was, Bonnie and Clyde is tonally jarring from my perspective. Long sequences of gun-fire end abruptly with Flatt and Scruggs' jaunty banjo tune "Foggy Mountain Breakdown."

The film seems to expect levity by showing our would-be master criminals joking around with terrified bystanders, or laughing at their own jokes, but the script doesn't really work that hard to make them three-dimensional, or like-able. There are a couple of scenes that deal with Clyde's bedroom impotency (and the desire for violence that that might imply compensates), and Bonnie's desire to write poetry and be something more than a yokel, but neither one really grows up in any way.

Although if they did, it wouldn't be a very accurate representation. As it is, the biggest inaccuracies are the movie-star looks and wardrobe the pair maintains while on the lam. Frank Hamer would never have been caught by them- he was a legendary, semi-retired Ranger brought in specially to hunt down Bonnie and Clyde, since the local police and FBI weren't getting results. Also, C. W. Moss is an amalgamation of two different associates of the Barrow gang.

Technically, it's a well-made film- it was one of the first film's to employ squibs (exploding packets of fake blood) en masse for realism, and Burnett Guffney more than deserved his Oscar for cinematography.

A small commentary, echoed by the direct descendant Natural Born Killers, crops up on the media's obsession with crime when reporters interview fame-hungry police and witnesses to one of the bank heists.

THE ENDING! SPOILERS!

Hamer tricks the blinded Blanche into revealing C. W. Moss's name- this leads them to Moss's father, who agrees to turn over Bonnie and Clyde in exchange for his son's pardon.

It all ends, of course, in the climactic massacre scene, in which a rustle in the bushes is the only prelude our two lovers get before they're riddled with bullets for a solid thirty seconds, shot from multiple angles at multiple speeds.

After a minute or so of ringing silence as the police look on, the screen tells us its "THE END."

END SPOILERS


Overall: Should It Be Higher, Lower?

I can't say I was moved, but I've been desensitized, no doubt, by all of the screen violence and sexuality that Bonnie and Clyde opened the door for.

I'm still gonna go with lower, since innovation doesn't mask what were to me, flat performances in an uneven film. Alas.

The Legacy:

The National Film Registry feels that it's worth saving, and it's elevated the reputation of the real life Bonnie and Clyde well-beyond what it deserves. In plenty of documents like Bryan Burroughs' thoroughly-researched book Public Enemies, it's made clear that they were little more than hillbillies on a spree, little known outside of Texas.

In January it was announced that Hilary Duff (a manufactured pop-star) and Kevin Zegers (an actual actor who was in Transamerica) will star in a new version of the story (not a remake of this film in particular), The Story of Bonnie and Clyde.

The Best Video Of It On YouTube:

Why not the ending scene (spoilers still involved, I suppose)? I watched and mostly just thought how awkward it'd be to act, with Dunaway sort of half in the car and Beatty rolling around on the ground (though as can clearly be scene in archival footage, in real life they were both in the car):



Leftover Thoughts:

-The compressed film version of events doesn't make it clear that the gang killed 14 people, mostly policemen.

-Blanche Barrow complained publicly about her shrill portrayal in the script, and Frank Hamer's widow actually sued the studio for writing him as so initially incompetent.

-Many historians strongly suspect that Bonnie, though complicit, never actually committed a murder or fired a gun herself (Dunaway is seen shooting several times in Bonnie and Clyde).