The Conversation

The Conversation. 1974 Paramount Pictures.
Starring: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall (uncredited)
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
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Francis Ford Coppola directed this film, a partial homage to Michaelangelo Antonioni's Blowup, in between the first two Godfather movies.

A paranoid surveillance expert named Harry Caul (Hackman) runs his own San Francisco based company, and is highly respected in his profession. He is also obsessed with his own privacy, living in a bare apartment behind a triple-locked door, using pay phones to make calls while claiming to not have a home one, and enclosing his office in wire mesh in a corner of an enormous warehouse. Harry is completely professional at work, but finds personal conflict very difficult.

Harry also agonizes over the content of the conversations he records, and the uses to which his clients put his surveillance activities, even if he insists his professional code absolves him of everything. His current assignment is monitoring the conversation of a couple (Williams & Forrest) as they walk through Union Square in San Francisco, and one key phrase ("He'd kill us if he got the chance") drives him mad, and he interprets it as a plot by the "Director" who hired him to murder the couple. Earlier in his career, one of Harry's assignments resulted in three people dying, and he is not keen on repeating that if he can help it.

Increasingly paranoid, Harry refuses to hand over the tapes, but loses them after he is seduced by a call girl who takes them after the fact. It turns out that the conversation he recorded was not a murder plot, but there is another tragedy that happens. The movie ends with Harry discovering that his own home is bugged, and after he destroys the place, he finds no listening device.

The Conversation was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Highly recommended.