The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Francis Ford Coppola · a film · 1974 · about 113 minutes · the theatrical cut
Mode
Suspense film turned inward; a thriller with almost no action, built on one man’s hearing and his guilt
Mythos
The confessional parodied, the eavesdropper as a priest who hears and does not absolve; the watcher watched; the hermit whose fortress is his prison
Phase
A few days in San Francisco, from one recorded conversation in a square to the listener’s own apartment taken apart, the conversation returning throughout as a refrain
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 113 minutes, in English; Bill Butler’s photography, Walter Murch’s sound and editing with Richard Chew, David Shire’s score for solo piano
Register
Cool, muted and grey, one temperature from the square to the stripped room; comic and vulgar at the convention, dreadful at the hotel wall
Scale
One listener, one recording, a trade and a corporation, a city
Governing Proposition
A surveillance expert records a young couple talking as they circle a crowded square, and, mixing the tape until one line surfaces, comes to believe that they will be killed. He has always held that what people say is not his concern, and he has failed victims before. The wager of the film is that a listener is a party to what his listening does; that hearing is interpretation, so that the same words, unchanged, can mean their opposite when the stress moves; and that the man who guards his privacy hardest ends as the most exposed.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins high above a square in San Francisco at lunchtime and comes down into it slowly, in winter light. A mime moves through the crowd. Through the crowd a young couple walk in circles, Ann and Mark, played by Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest, and they are being recorded, from the rooftops and from a van. The sound breaks up and returns, and their voices surface out of traffic and distortion. They walk in circles because a moving target is hard to hear. Before there is a story there is a recording, and the recording is all that the rest of the film will rehear.
The man in charge of it is Harry Caul, played by Gene Hackman, in a plastic raincoat; his assistant Stan is played by John Cazale. Francis Ford Coppola wrote, produced and directed the film, and Paramount released it in the United States in April 1974, in colour, at about 113 minutes. Bill Butler photographed it; Walter Murch and Richard Chew edited it, Murch also making the sound; David Shire wrote its music, for solo piano. It won the top prize at Cannes in 1974, then named the Grand Prix, and was nominated for three Academy Awards, for Best Picture, Original Screenplay and Sound, in the year another of its maker’s films won Best Picture.
Harry goes home. His landlady has let herself in with a key and left a bottle for his birthday, and he is shaken that anyone could enter. There are the locks on his door and the telephone. He visits Amy, played by Teri Garr, in her apartment; she asks him about himself, and he will not even tell her his telephone number. In a few short scenes the film establishes a man who cannot bear to be entered, and the price he pays for it: a home kept shut and a woman kept at the door.
Movement II
Harry works in a warehouse, in a workshop behind a wire cage. There he brings the three recordings of the square together, mixes them and filters the noise away, and the viewer follows the work as a process: a voice drowned, a voice partly recovered, a sentence surfacing out of the crowd. The film shows the trade as a craft, with its patience and its pride, and it lets us hear as Harry hears, so that when a line comes clear we take it as he takes it.
What surfaces leads him to believe that the couple are in danger, and that his recording will be the instrument of it. He has always held that what people say is not his concern, that he only records. But in a past job he failed victims, and the film lets the old guilt prepare the new hearing. The man who claims to be neutral is about to find out that the claim cannot be kept, and the viewer, hearing through his ears, is drawn into the same reading.
He takes the tapes to the client’s offices to deliver them to the Director, and is met by the Director’s assistant, Martin Stett, played by Harrison Ford. He refuses to hand them over and leaves with them. The refusal is an act of conscience, and the film will show how little it is worth. The corporation is a building, its elevators and its assistant; what it wants the recording for is never shown.
Movement III
Harry goes to confession. In church, to a listener he cannot see, the man who will not tell his girlfriend his telephone number tells a priest what his work has done. The film makes surveillance a parody of the confessional: the eavesdropper hears everything and absolves no one, and here, for once, he is the one who speaks while another listens behind a screen.
Then the convention of his trade, a hall of hardware and salesmen. Bernie Moran, played by Allen Garfield, is his rival, and Moran’s bragging names the past job Harry has confessed. The salesmanship is comic and vulgar and runs on longer than it needs to; under it the film does serious work. The past is spoken aloud in a public room, and Harry is handed a pen.
Afterwards the rivals come back to the workshop for a party. The pen turns out to be a bug, and Harry has been recorded at his own party. It is the first proof that the listener is heard. Meredith, played by Elizabeth MacRae, seduces him and steals the tapes. The recording has passed to the client without Harry’s consent, and the refusal that was his act of conscience has become futile.
Movement IV
Harry dreams. In fog he speaks to Ann, the woman he has only overheard, and tells her of his childhood. She does not answer. The dream is staged more loosely than the rest of the film and is the furthest it departs from its own manner, and it is a risk only partly earned; but it obeys the film’s law, since in it the listener at last speaks and is not heard.
He goes to the corporation and is paid. The Director, played by Robert Duvall, has the tapes, and there are photographs. Then the hotel: Harry takes the adjoining room and listens through the wall. The struggle is heard and not seen: Harry pressed to the wall, a hand on frosted glass, then the television turned up and the man hidden under the covers. The wait at the wall is long, longer than the dread it builds.
The next day he enters the room. It has been cleaned and is spotless. He goes through it and comes to the bathroom, flushes the toilet, and the bowl overflows with blood. It is the one image of horror the film allows, and it arrives in a clean room, after the event, to a man who heard it happen and did nothing but listen.
Movement V
The Director is dead; the papers report it. Ann is alive, seen in a car. Harry hears the line again, and the stress has moved. The words have not changed, and they now mean the opposite of what he took them to mean. He took the couple for victims because he once failed victims; his guilt prepared his ear. The film never says whether the recording has changed or only his hearing, and it places the change in the listener, where the viewer, who heard the line as Harry did, is convicted with him.
The telephone rings. It is Stett, with a warning, “We’ll be listening”, and a tape of Harry’s own playing on the saxophone. The man who protected his privacy hardest is the most exposed. Harry begins to search. He takes up the floor, strips the walls, breaks open his plaster statue of the Virgin. The sacred is dismantled in the hunt for a hidden listener.
He sits in the wreck of his apartment and plays the saxophone, the one thing in the film that softens him, while Shire’s piano carries the lament the film never states. The camera sweeps the room from side to side, mechanically, as a mounted lens would. The film that began with a recording made from above ends with the listener inside a recording, and the viewer at its controls.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets resistance almost everywhere. The square is required, since every later scene is a rehearing of it. The landlady’s key and Amy’s questions establish a man who cannot bear to be entered, and the price of it. The convention looks like a digression and is not: Moran’s bragging names the past job Harry has confessed, and the pen Harry is handed there bugs his own party, the first proof that the listener is heard. Meredith’s theft carries the tapes to the client without his consent, so his refusal becomes futile. What gives: the convention runs longer than its work, its salesmanship repeating its point; the dream is a risk only partly earned; and the long wait at the hotel wall is slower than the dread it builds.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds. A technician who claims that he only records, and that what is said is not his concern, is a party to what his recording does: neutrality is a moral evasion, and the film shows its cost in a man’s body and his home. Beside it stands a second truth, carried wholly in sound: hearing is interpretation. The same recording, its words unchanged, means the opposite when the stress moves, and Harry hears what his guilt prepares him to hear. A third follows: the instrument for knowing others becomes the instrument of one’s own confinement. Held below the top because the order the surveillance serves, the corporation and its Director, is left a sketch, and the disclosure is moral and psychological more than social.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The register is cool, muted and grey, and elevation is not its usual mode. When the film rises it is dreadful or desolate: the descent from above into a square in winter light, voices surfacing from noise; Harry pressed to the hotel wall, the struggle heard and not seen, a hand on frosted glass, the television turned up and the man hidden under the covers; next day the toilet flushed in a spotless room and the bowl overflowing with blood, the one image of horror the film allows; the saxophone played in the wreck of the apartment. Shire’s piano carries a lament the film never states. What holds the axis is frequency: the middle hour, workshop, convention and party, is level by design.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Part of the pattern is built. The confessional is load-bearing: Harry confesses in church to a listener he cannot see, and the film makes surveillance a parody of the confessional, the eavesdropper as an unordained priest who hears without absolving. The end completes it: hunting the hidden listener, he breaks open the statue of the Virgin, and the sacred is dismantled in the search. The watcher watched, the hermit whose fortress is his prison and the guilt that misreads every sign run through the plot rather than being alluded to. But they are figures of character more than a structure that governs the plot, as the Oedipal inquiry governs Chinatown (8.6); the eavesdropper’s fall is evoked as much as built, and Blow-Up had already given the form its pattern.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is open: Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), a man enlarging photographs of a park until a murder appears; the European film of the alienated professional; and the American suspense film, the voyeur of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (8.4) and the bathroom of Psycho (8.7). The turns are real. The premise moves from image to sound, so that the evidence is heard and the viewer hears it with Harry; a thriller with almost no action is built on a closed man’s interior; the solution is a rehearing, not new evidence. The stake: after The Godfather (9.0), Coppola chose a small, personal film at modest cost. It was cushioned by his standing, and the premise is borrowed whole: its transposition, however fruitful, is a turn on a proven path, and that holds the axis below the bar.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that hearing is interpretation, and only a film of recorded sound can make the viewer commit the error himself: we hear the tape as Harry hears it, filtered and partly recovered, and take the line as he takes it. When the stress moves, the viewer’s hearing is convicted with his. Whether the recording has changed or Harry’s ear has, the form places the change in the listener. The point of audition is bound to Harry as the camera of Chinatown is bound to its detective. The last shot completes the form: panning mechanically across the stripped room, the camera has become a surveillance camera. Held below the top because most of the film is classical continuity, and the change of stress can be felt as a device.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Fifty-two years of return are evidence. The questions stay open: whether the last hearing of the line is a changed recording or a changed hearing, and what follows from either; whether Harry’s guilt is religious, professional or older, in the childhood he recounts in the dream; whether the Director’s death is the couple’s crime alone or the company’s. The film has been reread against each era of surveillance, Watergate at its release, the state after 2001 and the disclosures of 2013, and has held each reading without strain. Formally it yields on return, since knowledge of the end changes every hearing of the opening. Held at the figure because part of the yield is a mystery’s and closes once solved, and much of the writing on the film is craft study of its sound rather than new reading.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Released in 1974, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is strong: the film made sound the subject and the narrative instrument of a feature, made a thriller out of an interior, and carried the European art film’s alienated protagonist into an American studio release without diluting it. It perfected and transposed a premise more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands at the head of the decade’s films of surveillance and paranoia beside The Parallax View (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975); De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) answers it directly; The Lives of Others (2006) takes up the listener changed by what he hears; and Murch’s work helped establish sound editing as authorship. The reach lies within a lineage and a craft rather than across the field.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across fifty-two years. The form survives whole in its one released cut, and restorations are repair. Presence is continuous: repertory, television, home video in every format, teaching in film and sound programmes, and selection for the National Film Registry. It is wide among those who study film and narrower beyond them, where the film is known as the small one its maker made between two epics, and that narrowness is charged in part. The fabric is fixed to 1974, in the reel-to-reel machines, the convention’s hardware and the analogue tape, but the film is about that technology, so it ages as history, and its subject has widened rather than dated.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, and it bears weight throughout. The sound: the opening’s layers of voice, traffic and distortion; the mixing in the workshop, which the viewer follows as process; the hotel wall heard rather than seen. Hackman’s Harry is a great closed performance, a man whose every gesture withholds, whose plastic raincoat is a second wall, who goes soft only with the saxophone. Cazale’s Stan is aggrieved and alive, Garfield’s Moran a salesman’s menace, Ford’s Stett polite and cold. Shire’s solo piano is spare and exact; the framing works by long lenses, high angles and rooms seen from fixed points. The costs hold the figure: the dream is staged more loosely than the rest, some secondary performances are thin, the convention is slack, and the construction shows its seams.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the convention’s salesmanship and Moran’s boasting, comic and vulgar, and the toilet brimming with blood in a cleaned hotel room. One law governs both: everyone is listening, and no one who listens is safe from being heard. Moran’s pen obeys it, and so do the landlady’s key, the confessional, Meredith’s seduction, Stett’s telephone call and the camera’s last sweep. The dream, the furthest formal departure, obeys it too: in it Harry at last speaks to someone he has only overheard, and is not answered. The tone is one temperature from the square to the stripped room. That evenness is a strength and a limit: the range is narrower than Chinatown’s, and narrowness is not coherence. The strain is slight: the hotel’s horror leans on the conventions of the suspense film.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Several orders are held in one structure: consciousness, in Harry, rendered as closure; labour, in a trade with its craft, its rivals, its convention and its market; the corporation, in the Director’s building, its elevators and its assistant; the sacred, in confession and the Virgin; sex and love, in Amy and Meredith; technology, as the medium of every relation; the city, in San Francisco’s square, warehouse and hotel. They are integrated: the job, the confession and the apartment obey one law of exposure. What holds the axis lowest: the state is absent except by implication; the family appears only in a childhood recalled in a dream; history is the release date’s, not the film’s; the couple and the Director are ciphers by design; and the whole is held through one consciousness that refuses to open.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Made at 8.8, then The Unconcealment at 8.7. A form in which only recorded sound could make the viewer commit the listener’s error, with the change of stress placed in the ear and the last shot turning the camera into a surveillance camera; a making carried by the sound and by Hackman’s closed performance; and a disclosure that the technician’s neutrality is complicity, and that hearing is interpretation shaped by guilt.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: labour, the corporation, the sacred, sex and technology are held through one consciousness, but the state is absent except by implication, the family appears only in a dream, history is the release date’s and the couple and the Director are ciphers. Next above it, The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep at 8.2: height is granted at the square, the hotel and the stripped room, but the middle hour is level by design, and the confessional is built while the other patterns are figures of character more than structure.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment at 8.7 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4, The Swerve at 8.3 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by three conditions of the Epochal Gate, Pressure on Tradition at 8.4, The Swerve at 8.3 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 against the 8.5 it requires, and by its aggregate: the twelve sum to 101.3, an average of 8.4 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Conversation as released by Paramount in the United States in April 1974, in its theatrical cut of about 113 minutes, in colour and in English, from the descent into the square to the camera’s last sweep: written, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, photographed by Bill Butler, edited by Walter Murch and Richard Chew, with sound by Murch and music by David Shire. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. The theatrical cut is the object; restorations for home video repair the film and are not judged as a different one. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and briefly; the recorded line on which the plot turns is described rather than quoted, and so is the content of the past job Harry confesses. The maker’s other films of 1972 and 1974 are context only, and nothing from them is credited or charged here. Figures and particulars that could not be verified are not given: among them the timing of the sequences, the number of times the recording is replayed, the scene and shot counts, the share of the dialogue, the credits for the film’s design and production companies, the history of the shoot and of the editing, the year of the film’s selection for the National Film Registry, and how the last hearing of the line was made.