The Conversation: No 12 best crime film of all time
Francis Ford Coppola, 1974
John Patterson
Sunday 17 October 2010 11.44 BST
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he finest of the four great paranoia thrillers of the 70s – alongside The Parallax View, All the President's Men (both from director Alan J Pakula), and Sidney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor – The Conversation drew attention because it was Coppola's first movie after his hugely successful The Godfather, but also because it dealt, quite coincidentally, as it happened – with wiretapping and surveillance at exactly the moment the Watergate crisis was reaching its climax.
Not that Coppola was making a movie about Nixon; he was reflecting – in the movie's fatefully ambiguous phrase "he'll kill us if he gets the chance" – on the critical response to The Godfather's perceived amorality. He wanted to show there are two ways of seeing everything (and one of them may prove fatal). Gene Hackman's bug-man Harry Caul is a guilt-ridden, sex-phobic Catholic haunted by the murder of two former targets and determined to prevent another killing. But in this universe of dislocation and paranoia, made up of half-heard sound fragments and deconstructed images, nothing is as it seems.
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