The Conversation
Film details
| Film Title | The Conversation |
|---|---|
| Suitability | |
| Genre | |
| Length | 113mins |
| Year | 1974 |
| Country | United States of America |
| Director | Francis Ford Coppola |
| Actors | Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams, Michael Higgins, Elizabeth MacRae, Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, Mark Wheeler, Robert Shields, Phoebe Alexander, Ramon Bieri, Gian-Carlo Coppola, Robert Duvall |
| Language | English |
| Showings |
Surveillance expert Harry Caul is hired by a mysterious client’s brusque aide to tail a young couple. Tracking the pair through San Francisco’s Union Square, Caul and his associate Stan manage to record a cryptic conversation between them. Tormented by memories of a previous case that ended badly, Caul becomes obsessed with the resulting tape, trying to determine if the couple is in danger.
Although not as formidable in scope and ambition as the Godfather films, this paranoid thriller is arguably one of the high points of the director Francis Ford Coppola’s extraordinary run of form in the early 1970s.
★★★★★
Thanks to Walter Murch’s keen, intuitive sound montage and Hackman’s clammy, subtle performance, the movie captures [an] elusive and universal fear-that of losing the power to respond, emotionally and morally, to the evidence of one’s own senses.
★★★★★
A major artistic asset to the film — besides script, direction and the top performances — is supervising editor Walter Murch’s sound collage and re-recording.
★★★★★
