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"He'd kill us if he had the chance" - I STILL hate this

posted a year ago by Daf (145)
3 replies | jump to latest

I've always, always hated the way they replay this line and change the inflection (and thus the meaning). In hindsight I get now that it wasn't meant to be literal and rather the movie was trying an elegant way to explain what the scheme was.

But still! I don't think that's very intuitive - my initial impression absolutely was that Harry had implausibly "misheard" or misremembered the conversation (rather than simply misunderstood or been tricked) and that the movie had cheated in order to present that. And honestly that still strikes me as the more natural way to read that sequence, and it ends up derailing the ending pretty severely. In fact it comes dangerously close to ruining the whole movie for me!

[–] rexamillion (56) a year ago

I LOVE this movie and include it as one of my all time favorites but I have to agree, it is the one weak link in the film. But overall it’s minor compared to all the things I love about it.

To justify it, maybe we’re supposed to think that as he kept improving and improving the sound he’s able to hear nuances better and better, and you could say it sounded like that the whole time but he just couldn’t pick out that inflection early on with all the other noises, then as he clears it up he finally hears it.

Or, there’s a more complicated way to go here, that it was his own guilt and suspicion and paranoia starting to come out, and he heard what wasn’t there. I’m sure that idea could be defended, and might be discussed in one of the other threads here even.

And finally Coppola could have been quite aware of these issues he was creating with that change and left it there, because there’s a LOT at the end of this movie that can be interpreted in different ways!

[–] Martoto (5024) a year ago

The movie is from Harry’s POV. So if we’re tricked, it’s because we’re hearing what Harry wants to hear, initially.

He doesn’t want anyone to get hurt so he perceives the two lovers as the potential victims and can’t hear their implied threat.

[–] Stratego (30496) a year ago

The different inflection doesn't matter, it was ALL imagined! He only hears it differently because he wants to believe Robert Duvall was the target.