THE CONVERSATION (1974) C widescreen 113m dir: Francis Ford Coppola

w/Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams, Michael Higgins, Elizabeth MacRae, Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, Mark Wheeler

A shattering mystery-drama shot in San Francisco about surveillance and wiretapping in America. Bugging expert (Hackman) becomes uneasy about the contents of a tape he made and what it will be used for. Hackman is marvelous as the guilt-ridden Catholic wire tapper trying to keep his sanity. Not a false note in this disciplined, chilling knockout of a film.

From The Movie Guide: "Following the triumph of THE GODFATHER, writer-director Francis Ford Coppola surprised everyone with this small, intimate, and brilliantly crafted film, which explores the implications of indiscriminate [sic] eavesdropping. Gene Hackman is superb as Harry Caul, a painfully lonely, cynical, paranoid, and alienated man whose work has driven him to guard his own privacy zealously, although there is precious little to protect. A year later Hackman would play another eavesdropper named Harry, this time a detective in Arthur Penn's NIGHT MOVES, and the similarities between the two characters was not lost on the actor --- NIGHT MOVES could be a prequel to THE CONVERSATION.

"The film was released just after the Watergate break-in, but it was written many years before and was already shooting when the news of the break-in appeared. Technically brilliant, THE CONVERSATION does in aural terms what Antonioni's BLOW UP does in visual terms. This is certainly one of the key films of the 1970s."