On the interpretation of stressed pronouns

In the 1974 movie The Conversation the utterance He’d kill us if he got the chance plays a major role.1 The leading actor, Gene Hackman, tape-records a conversation made by a couple for a client. The ‘he’ refers to Hackman’s client and the ‘us’ refers to the couple. Hackman’s immediate interpretation of the recorded utterance is that his client might actually kill the conversation participants, that is, the ‘us’. But in the final part of the movie, contrary to Hackman’s expectation, it is the couple who kill Hackman’s client, and not the other way around. After this surprising outcome, we hear the central utterance from the recording once more. However, now we hear it as He’d kill US if he got the chance, with stress on ‘us’. Did we previously misunderstand the utterance or did we miss the stress on the plural pronoun? No, the director has deliberately manipulated the recording and in doing so, radically changed our interpretation of the utterance. The final time the recording is played, ‘us’ is pronounced differently, thereby affecting the entire plot. Only at that point in the movie do we understand the recorded message as actually communicating the couple’s intention to kill Hackman’s client; when they say He’d kill US if he got the chance, they actually mean: We’d better kill him (before he kills us).