This obsessive study of privacy invaded represents another side of Francis Coppola, who remains best known for his "big" films like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. This is an intimate, small-scale and deeply felt work-and one of his best films (it won the Grand Prize at Cannes, considerable critical praise, then failed at the box office). Interestingly, its story reflects some of the same tensions between Catholicism, corporate crime and individual responsibility that informed The Godfather. Coppola's original screenplay-written pre-Watergate in 1967-uses the case of Harry Caul, "the best bugger on the West Coast," to initiate a (muffled) cry of moral despair concerning technology and privacy. Harry Caul is your basic technological genius: detached, humorless, professionally enthusiastic and personally guarded to the point of paranoia; he is also haunted, in his dark moments by the questionable morality of what he does. Gene Hackman perfectly portrays the polarities united in the one man. Curiosity and oblique concern draw Harry inextricably into a murder mystery, and a horror tale in the most fundamental sense: a consideration of the terrifying capacity for ruthlessness, duplicity and evil in the most average of human beings. Incidentally, The Conversation makes some of the most brilliant uses ever of sound on film; the whole morbid plot turns on an inflection.