“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. Like The Rain People one of his best films, and also a flop - The Conversation is an intimate, small-scale, and deeply personal work. Interestingly, its story reflects the same tensions between crime and Catholicism, corporate malfeasance and individual responsibility, that informed the Godfather epics. The Conversation failed at the box office in 1974, despite having won the Grand Prize at Cannes, and gained extraordinary critical praise. In his original screenplay (written in 1967, for those who might think Coppola's moral concerns about technology and privacy were inspired by Watergate), Coppola uses the case of Harry Caul (“the best wire-tapper in the West”), who makes the mistake of getting personally involved in his work, to create a murder mystery and a horror tale in the most fundamental sense - a consideration of the most terrifying human potentialities: the capacity for ruthlessness, duplicity, evil. A disturbingly serious work.