The Conversation, directed and written in 1974 by Francis Ford Coppola, raises some crucial questions as we become enmeshed in this amazing drama. This isn't a pretty film; you’re never going to hear that it’s the feel good movie about surveillance. But pretty or no, it’s a ride you’ll never forget.

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a top surveillance expert- arguably the best of his time. He’s a private contractor, which suits him fine, since he’s an intensely, painfully so, private man. He has been paid a large sum of money to tape a conversation between two young people who are out walking on a city square- the assignment comes from a mysterious man called the Director, and we know that the female half of the couple is the wife of this director. Harry, and his assistant Stan, (the wonderful John Cazale, who played edgy nervous insecurity as well as anyone ever did) are piecing together this conversation from the various listening devices employed, and we get to watch, as it were, over Harry’s shoulder. Soon, we are feeling what he is feeling, and by the time he begins to suspect that a murder might take place, we are caught in the same web of dread and paranoia that Harry inhabits.

One of the frustrating aspects to Caul, to us, is that the conversation, recorded by various devices as the couple strolls around the square, is never complete. One can’t enhance what isn’t there. Despite his best intentions (he'd had a case where people died,) slowly, very slowly, so that the process is visible to us, Harry gets involved.

This film works on several levels; as a thriller, as a mystery, and as a character study. Hackman has the gift so few actors share, (Spencer Tracy and Michael Caine come to mind)of making his craft look so easy. He gives us a character who might be simplistic, but is fully-fleshed. We come to understand his paranoia- justifiable when you consider his knowledge of surveillance. By the time the movie ends and we see him alone in his torn-up apartment, when we watch him searching for the devices that might be capturing him, we have come to know the character, we know precisely who he is, and we've come to perhaps pity him, perhaps identify with him. We've been on this journey with Harry where not much is what it seemed to have been, and we're left to ask two questions: who watches the watchers, and more importantly, who is watching us?

A very well done film.