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The sad, tragic demise of The Director SPOILERS

posted 8 years ago by !!!deleted!!! (63057267)
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**SPOILERS**

I revisited THE CONVERSATION last night and was deeply disturbed by the cruel nature in which The Director (Robert Duvall) was murdered.

Much like Michelangelo Antonioni's BLOWUP (1966), which this film owes a great deal to both narratively and thematically, the murder victim was lured to the spot of his untimely death by the promise of love. In THE CONVERSATION, The Director was led to believe (presumably by a good many of his co-workers) that his wife Ann (Cindy Williams) was cheating on him with one of his employees, Mark (Frederic Forrest). Whether there is any truth to the scenario depicted by Mark and Ann in the city center - where they knew they were being recorded - is wholly irrelevant to the narrative as their aim wasn't to wind up together, as they alluded to on the tapes, but rather to lure The Director to the hotel room where they were to supposedly meet for a romantic/sexual tryst.

Anyone familiar with this film knows the plot by now (I would like to think... there are those who believe the murder to be a figment of Harry Caul's [Gene Hackman] paranoid imagination), but I'm curious to know how many viewers looked deeply into the plight of the lovesick Director and how his love for his wife was the weapon that was chiefly used against him.

We, along with Harry, were led to believe that The Director was the source of potential harm for Ann and Mark. Harry was blinded by his prior tragic experience in New York that ended in the horrible murders of three people (one of them a child), so he only looked at the situation with Ann, Mark and The Director in that capacity; he figured that, much like with the triple homicide in New York, that Ann and Mark were in danger from a considerably more powerful and ruthless man. All he saw was a pair of young lovers who wanted to be together, and a wealthy, powerful executive who was willing to pay big money for recordings of them but was unwilling to disclose the purpose of his obvious paranoia. We can't blame Harry for drawing such conclusions, as it's easy for the viewer to draw the same ones, given the material presented to us.

However, when the twist comes and we see that The Director went to the hotel room discussed in the tapes solely to confront his wife and try to salvage his marriage, we are meant to realize that he is a victim in a large scale conspiracy fueled by corporate greed. The Director's assistant Martin (Harrison Ford) is shady from the offset, but when The Director is seen listening to the tapes, The Director snaps at Martin by saying: "You want it to be true!". Martin was clearly part of the conspiracy, and it was his job to convince The Director to take action against the supposedly budding romance between his wife and Mark. We already know that Mark works for the same company (Harry sees him in front of the elevator in The Director's building), and we know he's instrumental - to put it mildly - in the killing of The Director. After the murder and subsequent cover-up (The Director's stab wound-laden corpse is placed in a car and made to look like the result of a terrible crash), Ann is hounded by reporters who ask her what she's going to do with her newfound wealth and corporate power. She looks rattled by her new position, which leads me to believe that she is also - to some extent - a pawn in the scenario, controlled by people far more powerful and cunning than herself. Could it be that The Director wasn't willing to move forward in a certain direction with the company, which made his peers view him as an obstacle for what they wanted to accomplish? There's obviously something very Julius Caesar about that element of the plot, but I have always wondered if this was a thickly veiled comment on the killing of JFK, as many believed - and still do - that he was eliminated by his own governmental peers because he didn't want to initiate U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

The point of this colossal rant, however, is the sadness I still feel for The Director. We don't get much information about him, but what little we are given is that he was a powerful, dedicated businessman who was too blinded by his commitment to his work - and, ultimately, by his love for his wife - to recognize the intricate plot mounting around him. Was he a good man? Certainly in regard to his devotion for his wife and his marriage, I'd say. The moment before he's attacked by Mark we see him heartbroken and crying in a chair with his wife beside him. He didn't go to that hotel room to hurt her but rather to reconcile with her. Honestly, this is one of the most emotionally affecting murder stories I've ever seen, and I'm grateful to Francis Ford Coppola for concerning himself every bit as much with that portion of the story as he did with exploring the innermost complexities of Harry Caul. Had he been solely interested in making THE CONVERSATION a character study he likely wouldn't have bothered with the alarming plot twist at the film's conclusion concerning the killing of The Director; he could have simply played into what we and Harry thought was going to happen to Ann and Mark.

[–] monamask 8 years ago

Good stuff. There's so much to read into in this film.

[–] Kawada_Kira 8 years ago

The sad, tragic demise of The Director **SPOILERS**

Dude, your title itself was a spoiler. A pretty big one in fact. Once you start a thread by referring to the twist ending, you really don't need to add a spoiler warning, because you've already spoiled it for anyone who hasn't seen it.

Apart from that, though, great post and I agree with you. I hadn't actually thought much about that, but i've only just seen the movie for the first time and I think that if I watched it a second time I probably would have reflected a lot more on that. It's jarring how suddenly the young couple in the square turned from innocent to menacing and the director from menacing to tragic.

But i'm not sure I agree on this part:

After the murder and subsequent cover-up (The Director's stab wound-laden corpse is placed in a car and made to look like the result of a terrible crash), Ann is hounded by reporters who ask her what she's going to do with her newfound wealth and corporate power. She looks rattled by her new position, which leads me to believe that she is also - to some extent - a pawn in the scenario, controlled by people far more powerful and cunning than herself.

I don't know, she was awfully casual in the square for someone being manipulated by people more powerful than herself, to murder her own husband at that. She even asked that they stay longer and they keep walking when he suggested he wanted to leave. She took the time to pity the homeless man on the bench (which she probably wouldn't do if she was being controlled, as in that case she would be more worried about herself and her husband), and she casually sung a tune. I'd say that, at the end in front of the reporters, she was just being a good actress. Of course she had to appear shaken in front of the cameras, as her husband had just died after all. But she was as much a part of the murder as the others.