michael bay fans can skip this post

Since it's Friday night and the Borg is madly assimilating our Prime Minister and Governor General, and will soon start in on our finest athletes, I've decided to resurrect my already forgotten tradition of writing about non-marketing things on Friday nights. You know, things that humans actually consume with pleasure, like novels and movies.

The last half hour of appalling noise from CTV has naturally made me think of The Conversation, the whisper quiet but incredibly tense concoction that Coppola whipped up between finishing publicity for the first Godfather and starting location scouting for Godfather 2.

(Warning: if you think that Transformers is in any way a good movie, or if you're the one in the theatre who's always loudly asking, "Who's that guy?" or "Why'd he do that?" then don't bother.)

The Conversation is about an eavesdropping expert named Harry Caul, played by Gene Hackman. As the movie opens, he's trying to record the conversation of a couple walking in San Francisco's Union Square. But nothing is explained, no reason is given. As things unfold you begin to think that you know what's going on, but you don't. (That's as far as I'll go.)

Hackman is brilliant; it actually makes me sad to think how much he's been wasted in the last 20 years. And other Coppola favourites appear, including Robert Duvall, Harrison Ford and John Cazale. 

But they're not the best part of The Conversation. What's best is simply how the movie is told. It happens in the way that John Stuart Mill describes poetry; it's not heard but overheard. Everything is suggestion and menace. There's almost no verbalized threat, but threats are everywhere.

It's the brilliantly suggestive editing and sound design.

It's Walter Murch.

Murch started out in film with Coppola and George Lucas and had done editing and sound design for Godfather; he was hired to do both for this film. But as shooting on The Conversation was nearing the end, Coppola was contractually obligated to start scouting for Godfather 2, and was forced to leave without shooting some key scenes. Murch was left with a bunch of film that didn't necessarily have a cohesive story any more. But in a book of interviews he did with Michael Ondaatje, The Conversations, Murch describes how he began to play, to try and tell a different story with the film he had. He was forced to become much more allusive, working with suggestion instead of exposition. The film that Coppola had intended disappeared, but fortunately for us it became something even more interesting, something far more powerful.