Harry Caul has a hard time talking to people — even to, no, especially to people he loves. He can’t say “I love you,” because it’s too risky. If he understands anything, he understands how words can put you at risk. Words make you vulnerable. Words are deadly weapons. Harry is Gene Hackman’s greatest creation, the hero of the film Francis Ford Coppola made between Godfather films or, rather, began then abandoned three-quarters of the way through: The Conversation.
In my estimation, it is the best film of the best decade in the history of the medium. It’s my favorite film, too, the one that made me want to dedicate my life to the study of this art that can provide, as The Conversation did for me, a mirror into the things I despised about myself. And in providing me a new perspective of my perceived failures, it allowed me the distance to begin to come to terms with my difference and perhaps eventually ameliorate my disappointment with myself. For most of my life, the movies had fulfilled all roles to me: friend, mentor, confessor, lover and secret sharer… That spring of my Freshman year at University, watching The Conversation on a tattered 16mm print as part of a class, I realized that film could hold for me the meaning of my life, too, the story of why I was who I was told back to me in 24 images and flickering lacunae every second. There is a gap between every frame of film so you can fit yourself into movies as you watch them. It’s not finished, you see, without you.
Harry Caul is a surveillance expert. The poster I have of The Conversation in my office says it all:
Harry Caul is an invader of privacy.
The best in the business.
He can record
any conversation
between two people
anywhere.
So far,
three people are dead
because of him.
I connected with Harry, I think, because he’s so good at listening. He is obsessed with it, with how people communicate with one another because he wants to know how to do it himself. He listens because there’s less to risk. He is an anthropologist and his study is of the kinds of interactions from which he is, by disposition and circumstance, cut off. So he’s made a living of listening and interpreting and although he’s considered to be the best at what he does by people who pay him to hear, he still makes terrible mistakes, especially when it comes to the things people say to one another when they’re in love. Watch the way Gene Hackman listens. His eyes will narrow in concentration and his forehead will crease, probably he’ll get that crooked smirk when he figures it out. He’s smarter than you. He’s always one step ahead. Look at him in his first major role as Buck Barrow, Clyde’s brother, a cloud of jovial energy except that he’s always watching — those eyes, glaring above his wife’s hand covering his mouth when the gang is cornered in a motel one night. Buck seems like a lot of fun except he’s scary. He’s a landmine, a grenade, all potential energy and menacing even when he’s just sitting still. His last moments in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde, blinded, maddened by pain and on all fours like a stuck boar, are for me more visceral and disturbing than the picture’s climactic bloodbath.
In The Conversation, Hackman’s Harry is hired to capture the conversation between two young lovers and during the course of first doing it, then deciphering it, the conversation mutates in his mind from innocence and longing to horror and foreboding. Harry is consumed by self-loathing. He is alone in a crowd. He wants to protect his victims — to protect them from him. He is the very manifestation of depression and unresolved trauma. When his apprentice Stanley (John Cazale) takes his anonymity as an opportunity to take surreptitious snaps of young women checking their lipstick, Harry is furious. Those eyes flash. Withdrawn, stammering, bespectacled and forever clad in a ridiculous raincoat, Harry can be scary, too. He’s a steam kettle without a spout and all of that pressure has to go somewhere.
He has a dream in The Conversation — an incomplete scene in which Harry tries to warn one of his subjects about the storm he fears is gathering on her horizon. It wasn’t meant to be a dream sequence, but it was converted into one by the film’s editor, Walter Murch after Coppola fled for The Godfather II. In the dream Harry speaks eloquently and at length. He talks about himself — a fever he had as a child and how he’s not afraid of death, but he is afraid of murder. He visits his girlfriend and she asks him to tell her about himself, anything, something. He gets angry. Look at how Hackman plays it: not angry like he might strike her, even raise his voice at her, but angry maybe just at himself and the barrier he’s not capable of overcoming. He leaves, but gives her money first to pay for her rent. He wants to care for someone and he wants to be cared for, but though his chosen field is the deep study of language, he doesn’t have the words to ask to be loved.
I was devastated by The Conversation because it saw me more clearly than I had ever been seen before. It understood my discomfort in social situations, my fear of speaking love because my parents had withheld it from me and rationed it back out conditionally, of ever feeling proud of my achievements because they were not nearly good enough. Hackman’s performance is indescribable. He listens to the conversation he’s stolen and hears a pretty young woman talk about a derelict asleep on a park bench — how there must be someone in the world who loves him and wonders where he is. Hackman whispers the words after she speaks them. I don’t think you can direct that. He imagines she’s talking about him. This is Hackman’s art, his gift. Combative and bellicose in life, he nurses a palpable self-loathing on screen and his characters are ever on the verge of too much knowledge of themselves and actively in avoidance of actualization. It made him perfect as powerful men in crisis, actively devolving and at the mercy of their basest, most violent natures. That pressure has to go somewhere.He was a rapist President in Clint Eastwood’s Absolute Power; a homicidal Secretary of Defense who kills his lover in No Way Out; a vicious, drug-dealing cop in Cisco Pike; a white-slaver and slaughterhouse magnate in Prime Cut; a terrifying submarine captain in Crimson Tide; and a real estate developer who becomes Superman’s arch enemy, trying to drown the Man of Steel in a sewer. He smiles a lot, Hackman does. He cackles, too. When he’s playing bad men, his mirth is obscene. He’s phenomenal as brutal Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett in Unforgiven who tortures his prisoners to death, but is building a house for himself where he dreams of retiring one day. Phenomenal again as another kind of Western villain, John Herod in Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead, who finds himself in a duel against his son and doesn’t even hesitate on the draw.
He played hard men and played them as human beings. As crass, violent cop Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, he is all masculine charisma and nitroglycerin volatility: racist, reckless, driven by the inner-certainty of the kind of person who can’t afford to be wrong because being wrong is what they fear they always are. If he’s wrong, other people will see him as he sees himself and that would be unbearable. But did you see him in John Frankenheimer’s The French Connection II where he’s shipped off to France, can’t speak the language, is humiliated, hooked on heroin? I don’t know that Hackman was ever better than he is here — but that’s true of so many of his performances. As you’re watching them, you can’t imagine he could be better. You can’t imagine anyone was ever better. Look at him as Harry Moseby, ex-Everybody’s All-American turned failed gumshoe in Night Moves, as he plays chess one night with the woman he might be falling in love with and she shows him a series of knight moves that cost an arrogant champion a match once upon a time. “Oh, that’s nice” he says and looks just at her as he says it. You see, he means several things every single time he says one thing and when his heart is breaking, there’s a little part of him that thinks he deserves that. Later, after watching the girl dancing with her husband in a scene as uncanny and disturbing as any of the film’s violence, he declares he’s going to bed and gives them an awkward salute. Why would he do a thing like that? I don’t think he has any idea either, but it’s just the right expression of surrender and retreat. So long. Farewell.
He played men who made mistakes and had to hide them: like the good coach with a bad temper in Hoosiers; like in Andrew Davis’ The Package where as a career military man who can’t get promoted (“I keep saying no!” he tells his men but we suspect differently) and then he loses the prisoner he’s supposed to be transporting. He’s a former Mississippi lawman-turned-FBI spook in Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning who dearly loves this state where he’s from and deeply regrets its legacy of slavery and segregation. When the locals refer to him as a “Hoover boy,” watch how Hackman glances to the left, laughs that brittle laugh of his, and nods. Watch his face when the good ol’ boys make fun of Martin Luther King. He’s smiling, but he’s embarrassed for them and for himself, too. He’s not righteous about it with these yokels because he recognizes this as who he is but for the grace of… what? A little education, a different set of influences, a book at the right time? Watch Hackman holding hats in his hands — how he makes them bounce like a little animal as he looks around the room, expressing the currents raging in him just underneath his resolve as he holds his body absolutely stock still. Watching. Listening. Processing. Processing.
His last great film is Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. He was notoriously tetchy on set with Anderson. He didn’t trust his direction and was restless in letting him know it. For that, Anderson joined varied and venerable company.
Hackman’s nickname within the industry was “Vesuvius,” and he credited his drive and his volcanic volatility to an abusive childhood beneath the heal of an alcoholic father who abandoned them when Hackman was 13, his dishonorable discharge from the Marines for fighting, and being voted at the Pasadena Playhouse acting school (before flunking out with the lowest grades in the school’s history) as “most unlikely to succeed.” As Royal, the patriarch of a family of geniuses fallen on hard times, he insinuates himself back into the family he’s abandoned with a lie about terminal cancer — the only thing he can think of to win his way back into their graces. I wonder if his pugnaciousness this time had something to do with him essentially acting the role of his own father returning to the fold after decades of neglect. His Royal is nasty, crude, and also vulnerable and yearning. He doesn’t know how to speak. He doesn’t know really how to behave. He doesn’t know how to show love to the people he loves the most and knows he’s disappointed them. But they don’t know he’s just as disappointed, more so, with himself. The film ends with his death, one of his sons at his side, holding his hands as he communicates his love to him at last — not through words, but through his eyes, the way he looks at his boy in his last seconds.
In that moment, I imagine he’s my dad, gone now twenty-some years. I imagine when he looks what he sees is me. In his recognition, I feel assurance that I wasn’t as alone as I had always feared: unloved and abandoned. I don’t always have the courage to tell my wife I love her because I love her the most. What if she figured out I couldn’t deserve her love? Who could understand that? I think Hackman could.
Gene Hackman decided the course of my life with the truth of himself as he expressed it through his art. In his last screen death I believed finally it was possible to be known for all of my faults and still seen as deserving to be known. He is unparalleled in the modern conversation. He died at some time in the last days of February 2025, and he leaves behind a masterpiece of a five-decade career as searingly pure and essential as anything ever memorialized on the screen. He was one of the greats.
Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.
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