The Conversation (1974) movie trailer . . . . Link

Tonight on FILM 4 23:15 - 01:25 Monday 14 November 2011

The Conversation (1974) is the slowly-gripping, bleak study of electronic surveillance and threat of new technologies that is examined through the private, internalized life of a lonely and detached expert 'bugger.' The conspiracy thriller is an effective character study that exposes the emerging conscience of an estranged eavesdropper whose work once resulted in the death of three people:

Harry Caul...an invader of privacy. The best in the business. He can record any conversation between two people anywhere. So far, three people are dead because of him.

The timely, low-budget cinematic masterpiece of the 1970s was written, produced and released by director Francis Ford Coppola before and during the Wategate era (and between his two Godfather films) - a time of heightened concern over the violation of civil liberties. Its claustrophobic themes of the destruction of privacy, alienation, guilt, voyeurism, justified paranoia, unprincipled corporate power and personal responsibility effectively responded to growing, ominous 20th century threats of eavesdropping to personal liberties.

The haunted surveillance expert, who pursues a case (seemingly of marital infidelity) that demonstrates his rarified human emotion, discovers that he has become the victim of his own technological profession and intrigue by film's end. [His last name, 'caul', literally means the protective, embryonic membrane that sometimes covers the head of a child at birth.]