Godfather (17 page)

After the toilet in
The Conversation
has vomited blood all over the bathroom, Harry hastens to the Director's office complex. He is startled when outside the building he spies a newspaper headline declaring that the Director has been killed in an auto accident. In a flash he realizes that he
totally misinterpreted the conversation on the tapes. He assumed that the Director had been plotting to kill Ann and Mark when in reality it is Ann and Mark who have murdered the Director. It seems that the Director, when he learned from the master tape of their rendezvous at the Jack Tar Hotel, decided to surprise them in order to have a showdown with his unfaithful wife and her inamorato. Stett, who was in cahoots with her and Mark all along, prepared them for this eventuality. They had counted on the Director invading their hotel room once he had heard the tape. They arranged to slay him and to disguise his death as a traffic accident so that they could possess his wealth and power.

Too late Harry realizes that he had misunderstood Mark's statement on the tape, “He'd
kill
us if he got the chance.” He now understands that Mark had really said, “He'd kill
us
if he got the chance”—meaning that they would murder the Director before he got the opportunity to slay them.

Completely shattered by this revelation, Harry withdraws to his apartment and seeks solace in playing his saxophone. He receives one last telephone call from Stett, who warns Harry, “We know that you know, and we are watching you.” Aware that his own living quarters have now been bugged, Harry frantically dismantles the whole apartment, futilely looking for the wiretapping device. Always the conscientious Catholic, Harry hesitates to smash the plaster statue of Mary, the mother of Christ, but finally does. Still, he dismembers his apartment to no avail.

The film ends with Harry in despair, playing a mournful melody on his sax. Harry, an intensely private and lonely man, retreats from his profession as a wiretapper to his hobby as a musician—from being someone preoccupied with recording devices to someone absorbed in the music of his own tenor sax. Coppola's rotating camera slowly encircles Harry, as if the camera itself were a surveillance device. He is imprisoned in his own apartment and is being monitored by the conspirators who liquidated the Director. Furthermore, Foster Hirsch observes, “Harry is trapped from within by the coils of his own unravelling psyche.”
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Coppola observes on the DVD that he has often been asked where the bug was planted in Harry's apartment. “I always imagined that it was in the strap of his saxophone, which was hanging around his neck and was fastened with a clasp to his sax. Harry often forgot to take the strap off after he finished playing,” so he absentmindedly wore it around his neck like a necklace that he was unaware of.

Another question that Coppola has sometimes been asked is how Harry Caul got his rather odd last name. “I dictated the script into a tape recorder and a secretary transcribed it. I called him Harry Call, but she had
typed Caul. When I saw what she had typed, I decided to keep the spelling, since I knew what a caul is.” It is the membrane that surrounds a fetus until it is born. Through most of the movie, Coppola continues, Harry wears a translucent plastic raincoat, a visual symbol that he is still insulated inside a caul. At one point “Harry lies down on the bed next to his mistress Amy [Teri Garr] without removing his transparent raincoat,” says Coppola. “When she asks him personal questions about himself, he bristles. She equivalently wants to look through the transparent raincoat at the man underneath,” and he accuses her of prying.

Another metaphor in the movie also came about by chance. The scenes in the apartment house where Harry lived in the film were shot on location in a neighborhood that was being torn down for redevelopment. “Through Harry's window we see a building across the way being demolished,” Coppola says on the DVD. “The notion of tearing down the walls that protect the people inside from the view of others is thematically related to a film about surveillance. The lives of the inhabitants of the building are being exposed to the light of day” and to the gaze of others.

As quoted earlier, Walter Murch notes that Coppola gives his collaborators a great deal of leeway in performing their functions on a film. This was particularly true of Murch's work in making the final cut for the present film. Since Coppola had to begin preproduction on
Godfather II
immediately after he finished shooting
The Conversation
, he appointed Murch as both film editor and sound engineer on
The Conversation
and left Murch to supervise postproduction on his own. This meant that the director was not around on a daily basis to confer with him as a director normally does with an editor during postproduction.

Murch was really “a full collaborator on the film,” says Coppola. He edited the picture, assisted by Richard Chew, and mixed the sound track. Although Murch had already served as sound engineer on other movies, this was his first assignment as a film editor on a feature motion picture. “Essentially Francis left me on my own,” says Murch. About once a month Murch would invite Coppola to come by the editing room for a progress report.
³⁷
Murch would screen the rough cut for Coppola, who would make suggestions, which Murch then would implement.

Naturally, Murch found the task of sifting through the mountains of footage daunting. Postproduction took nearly a year. “In the process Murch invented some new plot connections and rediscovered others that had been temporarily overlooked,” Goodwin and Wise write.
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One narrative link that Murch made during editing concerned Meredith, the call girl, and the theft of the tapes. In the screenplay “Meredith
slept with Harry and simply disappeared the next morning,” Murch comments on the DVD. In a separate scene Harry discovered that the tapes had been snatched by some minion of Stett, the Director's chief assistant. “I thought that, if we insinuated that Meredith took the tapes, it would make things hang together better.” It would be more interesting to identify the thief as the call girl, rather than make the thief some anonymous henchman of Stett's. Hence Murch combined the two incidents, so that it is evident that Meredith seduced Harry in order to steal the tapes for Stett. “But that tie-up was constructed during editing,” Murch concludes. “That was not in the script.”

Another modification of the scenario that Murch made during editing centers on the dream sequence in which Harry imagines that he sees Ann in a park engulfed in a misty fog and attempts to talk to her. In the screenplay this incident is not a dream at all. Harry follows Ann into the park and tries to explain himself to her. He says he had polio as a child and almost drowned in the bathtub when his mother was not around. “I was disappointed that I survived,” he explains. “You see, I'm not afraid of death, but I am afraid of murder.” He urgently calls after her as she recoils from him and disappears in the swirling fog. “He'll kill you if he gets the chance.” After Coppola had filmed this scene, he was inclined to scrap it, since he did not think it held up. “It remained for Walter Murch's creativity in the editing room,” Coppola says on the DVD, to employ the scene as a dream sequence that shows Harry's anxiety for Ann, whom he still sees at this point as someone he wants to save from danger.

Murch made an even more significant contribution to the film while he was mixing the sound track. He discovered a crucial bit of tape that he had previously overlooked: it was an alternate reading of the line in the opening sequence in which Frederic Forrest as Mark altered the emphasis from “He'd
kill
us if he got the chance” to “He'd kill
us
if he got the chance.” Murch decided to employ both readings of the line in the film at different points—the more innocuous one in the first scene, and the more sinister one when Harry later hears the remark again late in the movie. Coppola completely agreed with Murch when the latter pointed out that it was the only way to clench the idea for the audience that Harry had finally uncovered the truth (i.e., that Mark and Ann were planning to murder her husband, and not vice versa). Murch explains that he wanted to clarify for the audience that the first time Harry hears Mark's statement, Harry thinks of Mark and Ann as two potential victims who need his protection. But when Murch employed the second reading of the line with a different inflection, which emphasizes
us
rather than
kill
, he wanted to indicate to the filmgoer
that the phrase now takes on a new emphasis for Harry. As Murch puts it, “Harry hears the line in his mind as it must have been all along”: “He'd kill
us
if he got the chance.” This implies: If he is going to kill them, they should kill him first. At last Murch dug out the old recording of Forrest's reading of the line that he had disregarded months before and used it.
³⁹

In the course of mixing the sound track Murch noticed the significance of Coppola arranging to have a single piano to provide the underscore for the film. The background music was composed and played by David Shire, who at that time was married to Coppola's sister Talia Shire.
The Conversation
is one of the few mainstream Hollywood films to have a background score played by a solo instrument (the zither accompaniment for Carol Reed's
The Third Man
[1949] also comes to mind). Because the background music was scored for piano alone, the music has a lonely and haunting sound: “a single instrument for a film about a single, lonely man,” says Murch on the DVD.

Although Gene Hackman turned in a superb performance as Harry Caul, Coppola has described the actor as feeling miserable inside Harry's emotional straightjacket. “He was really a constipated character,” comments Hackman. It was a difficult role to play because it was so low key.
⁴⁰
Harry's bruised professionalism and sense of weary detachment as he leads his shadowy existence are evidence of a complex personality. He believes emotions are a nuisance during business hours, and all his hours are business hours. Many critics still consider Harry Caul to be Hackman's most virtuoso performance.

The Conversation
is sometimes compared to Michelangelo Antonioni's
Blow-Up
(1966), which is about a photographer who thinks he spies evidence of a murder in the background of one of his photos, but the evidence mysteriously disappears from his studio. On the contrary, Coppola probes the mind of his hermetic, guilt-ridden hero much more deeply than Antonioni does in his film. The characterization of the photographer in
Blow-Up
is superficial by comparison to the in-depth portrait of the surveillance expert Hackman played in Coppola's picture.

Asked to name his favorite among his films, Coppola indicated to me that it was
The Conversation
, because “it is a personal film based on my own original screenplay.” Recently he confirmed that
The Conversation
remains his best movie in his opinion, since “it represented a personal direction where I wanted to take my career” (i.e., he always preferred to create his own story material, rather than make films derived from literary sources).
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Coppola's predilection for the film is understandable, for the movie is rarely less than accomplished, its every frame polished and gleaming in the director's best manner. In summary, it is a masterwork.

The Conversation
proved to be a prestige picture for Paramount. It won the Palme d'Or, the grand prize, at the Cannes International Film Festival. It also copped two major Academy Award nominations, for best picture of the year and for best original screenplay. Nonetheless, audiences did not show up for the movie, either here or abroad, since it was generally considered to be too slow-moving and cerebral for a thriller. Although the picture had gotten into the black by 1975, it was still considered a flop as far as its initial theatrical run was concerned.

You're a Big Boy Now
met the same fate in 1966. At that time Coppola made a trade-off with Warners-Seven. He directed
Finian's Rainbow
in exchange for the studio financing
The Rain People
, a film that eventually also failed commercially. So Coppola decided that he must be very careful about what he did next after
The Rain People
. As a result of his winning an Oscar for co-scripting
Patton
, Paramount offered him what looked like a formula gangster picture based on a pulp novel about the Mafia. As such, it did not seem to him a very promising venture at all.

You can get a lot more done with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.

—Al Capone

I've never made a movie as good as
The Godfather
, and I don't have the ambition to try.

—Steven Spielberg

When Francis Coppola first considered filming Mario Puzo's novel
The Godfather
, he perused the book and found it a rather sensational, sleazy crime novel. But, then, Puzo was not aspiring to create a work of literature. When he conceived it, as he confesses in
The Godfather Papers
, he had already published two novels that did have literary pretensions, but they went largely unread. He decided to write a novel about the Mafia because this time around he was determined to turn out a bestseller. And that accounts for the liberal doses of sex and violence in the book, which are precisely what turned Coppola off. Deeply in debt, Puzo decided that “it was time to grow up and sell out, as Lenny Bruce advised.”
¹

Progress was slow because Puzo had no direct links with the underworld; therefore, his knowledge of the Mafia was derived totally from research. In the spring of 1968 he met with Robert Evans, production chief at
Paramount, and offered him the screen rights for his as yet unfinished opus. “From a rumpled envelope he took out fifty or sixty even more rumpled pages,” Evans remembers. Puzo explained that his novel, tentatively titled
Mafia
, was going to give the inside story on organized crime. An inveterate gambler, Puzo confided to Evans that he had a $10,000 gambling debt that he had to pay off pronto, and hence he would consider any reasonable advance that Evans proposed. “I've just optioned
Mafia
for $12,500,” Evans immediately replied. He did not know it then, Evans adds, but for that paltry sum, he now owned the rights “to the Hope diamond of literature.”