Home / The Conversation / Gene Hackman
- Actor
- Gene Hackman
- Character
- Harry Caul
- Watch
- Unidentified watch
- Status
- Unidentified
Gene Hackman sits at his workstation with his hands clasped, listening to a recording he has played back dozens of times. The watch on his wrist catches the light — gold-toned, round, on a leather strap. He is Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), the best surveillance man in San Francisco and possibly the most paranoid person alive. Hackman plays Caul as a man who can capture any conversation in any crowd but cannot make sense of the one recording that matters. Coppola made the film between the two Godfathers, and it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
The watch hasn't been identified. It reads as a modest gold dress watch, the kind of thing a man who lives alone in a bare apartment might wear because he bought it years ago and never thought about it again. Harry Caul does not accessorize. He barely decorates. The watch is on his wrist because it tells the time, and time is the only thing Harry trusts.
Evidence
1 frame on file
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