The Conversation review – Gene Hackman is unforgettable in

Hackman’s surveillance expert Harry Caul is inexpressibly sad and lonely – a classic and poignant American everyman

God’s surveillance is everywhere: this is the thought that weighs heavily on bugging expert and practising Catholic Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s eerie 1974 classic, now on rerelease. It was a movie that intuited Watergate-era paranoia and disillusion: at the nadir of his despair, Harry ends up smashing a figure of the Blessed Virgin in his apartment because he suspects it contains a listening device. The Conversation contains an unforgettable performance from Gene Hackman as Caul: in his glasses and moustache, drab suit, white shirt and tie with clear plastic mac worn indoors, it is a classic and poignant “American everyman” portrayal, to put alongside Ernest Borgnine in Delbert Mann’s Marty from 1955 or Paul Walter Hauser in Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell from 2019. He probably inspired Ulrich Mühe’s East German Stasi agent in Florian von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film The Lives of Others, eavesdropping on lives happier and more fulfilling than his.

Caul works in San Francisco, as a private espionage and security consultant tracking a young couple at the behest of executives at a certain shadowy corporation, played by Robert Duvall and Harrison Ford. The challenge is somehow to tape-record everything this targets murmur secretively to each other as they walk around a crowded public square. Like a great artist aware that he is about to bring off his masterpiece, Harry obsesses over the conversation, playing it over and over again; it is mostly dull chat with whose details we, the audience, are to become uncomfortably and unnaturally familiar. And Coppola lets us ponder: what would it be like if we could scrutinise in such detail a forgettable 10 minutes in any of our lives? Could some meaning be distilled from it? Might there be a kind of heroism and decency discernible in its ordinariness, a banality of good?