In between the two Godfathers, and before the great Apocalypse, stood a Conversation. And even before two cars raced each other on an open road, and later, a light saber blazed to life and slashed across the room, there was something called THX-1138. Indeed, in the early 1970s, two filmmakers—Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas—used one San Francisco film company—American Zoetrope—and one very gifted editor—Walter Murch—to craft a new method to tweak the audio waves fantastic. Murch revolutionized the way sound could be edited and showcased almost like a living character in Lucas’s first groundbreaking film THX-1138, but it would be the film that he worked on in between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II where he would exploit that technique to an even greater effect, this week’s Hidden Flick, The Conversation.

The film stars Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who records conversations for various corporate and governmental agencies. Essentially, Hackman’s character wire-taps, bugs, and tapes by any technical means necessary. The conversation of the film’s title takes place at the beginning of the story as a couple walks in San Francisco’s Union Square while being recorded from three microphones—one held in a bag carried by a wandering off-duty cop, the others by two soloists in opposing buildings, directing their recording equipment at the couple in the square with long devices which appear, at first, to be rifles as if the two are trained snipers scoping out their hapless prey. READ ON for more on this week’s Hidden Flick…

Coppola wrote, produced and directed the film after The Godfather and while he was preparing for its sequel, The Godfather Part II. He was based in San Francisco and used the film company that he began with George Lucas among other filmmakers, American Zoetrope; although the project was financed by Paramount Pictures (as were both Godfathers). The Conversation features a young cast of Coppola and Lucas luminaries—John Cazale, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, and Robert Duvall. Cazale played Fredo Corleone in the first two Godfathers, Williams was in Lucas’s American Graffiti, and Forrest, Ford, and Duvall would also appear in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Before all of that, Duvall played the lead character in THX-1138—a man trapped in an Orwellian futuristic society who doesn’t want to take his happy pills, go to work, come home, watch television, and veg out to sexless oblivion within a tight population-controlled dystopia. He wants to be FREE, man, to do what he wants with who he wants. Oh…and lest we forget, Harrison Ford appeared as the smug hot rodding cowboy in American Graffiti, before towering over two dynasties that have received very little publicity over the years—the Star Wars and Indiana Jones uber-franchises.

But it is Hackman’s quietly powerful performance, Coppola’s taut script with lean direction, and Murch’s film and sound editing that make The Conversation so special. Hackman is remote, aloof, and cutoff from other people—he even tells the girl he sees, Teri Garr in a beautifully understated scene, that he has no phone, and abruptly leaves when she asks too many questions about his life, a life that pretty much includes spying on strangers for cold, cynical cash. Ironically, Hackman gets upset on the few occasions when others attempt to probe into his own personal life—a hypocritical Peeping Tom.

It is that aspect of intrusion into our lives—we are weirdly connected, separated only by our wonderfully individual traits—that haunts this Watergate-era film and makes it, in a way, a timeless classic. Wire-tapping and surveillance would get far more sophisticated in the 21st century, post-9/11, but in The Conversation the seeds are planted that what one does can sometimes lead to tragic results. Hackman once successfully spied on two individuals and the sensitive discussions documented led to several murders. Alas, he is in the same position again in The Conversation, but this time he is less cynical, less removed from his work—he can no longer stand by while so-called innocent people are endangered by his taped bits of verbal dynamite. It is this change in his character which moves Hackman to a fine and sublime performance—a bookend to his larger-than-life turn as rogue cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in William Friedken’s The French Connection.

Walter Murch edited The Conversation and, as previously mentioned, served in another key role—mixing the innovative use of sound on the 1974 gem as he did on THX-1138, and, later, Apocalypse Now for which he would receive an Oscar. In The Conversation, Murch blurs the audio, blends dialogue, amplifies phrases, shoots electronic noise through the speakers, turns human words into vast alienesque motifs, bubbles up the mix, and carefully moves the volume to silence as the decibel trail fades away…

No sound editor working today should miss out on these old school tactics to emphasize audio as a character that cannot be fleshed out on the scripted page. Instead, the sonic imagery glides across the screen, roving through the halls of the mind like a rambunctious motorcycle gang, circling our fears and cataloging our verbal crimes—an intangible arc of audio light if only for two hours of escapist cinematic fare masqueraded as the paranoia that we still face: what if someone is listening to us? What if?! The Internet Age has changed that question to “What happens when everyone listens?”