The Conversation

Before smartphones in our pocket, CCTV everywhere, cookies, and trackers, surveillance was done through flimsy wires, temperamental tapes, and grumpy men sitting in vans listening. Paranoid around the time of Watergate – although The Conversation famously was completed before the scandal broke out – Hollywood started to read into everything and everyone and so when Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul hears the words “he’d kill us if he got the chance,” he becomes suspicious and obsessive and can’t let it go. Thinking himself involved, his life begins to unravel, his tapes spilling out, as anything could be bugged, and anyone could be listening. Coppola directs this like a master, with every sound ringing with potential meaning, every image seeming like it’s hiding something, most notoriously culminating with a climactic scene in a bathroom, reminiscent of Psycho. Fifty years on and The Conversation’s protagonist might have many more reasons to suspect he’s being observed. The soundtrack is relentlessly unsettling, creating an atmosphere thick with intrigue and fear. This is one of the most fascinating films of the 1970s and not to be missed.

Daniel Kallin