Arguably the best film from legendary director Francis Ford Coppola - according to many critics, to us, and to Coppola himself! He is particularly proud of it, partly because he wrote it as well as directing it.

+ DISCUSSION: Great opportunity tonight to discuss this classic, as we have invited a Historian, specialist of San Francisco to introduce and discuss the film!

"If you didn't catch this fabulous thriller first time round, don't miss this opportunity to see it gloriously restored on the big screen. The Conversation is a masterpiece." - THE URBAN CINEPHILE

PLOT

A reclusive surveillance expert named Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) stumbles across what he believes to be a murder plot. It begins when he is hired by a client (Robert Duvall) to record a conversation between a young couple and through repeated playbacks of their dialogue suspects they may be in great danger.

Then the tapes are stolen and Harry, feeling guilty over what he has uncovered, becomes increasingly obsessed with the couple (played by Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest). Should he warn them? Should he try to intervene somehow? As Harry's paranoia escalates he is driven to investigate a reference to room 773 at the Jack Tar Hotel...

REVIEWS

This film is seen by many critics as Coppola's masterpiece - and we would tend to agree. It's an incredible film, tense, psychological, simple and complex at the same time, and here is what other people say:

"There's a strong case to be made for The Conversation being Coppola's greatest film. Which, when you consider what else he's made, is high praise indeed." - FILM4

"This is a severe and gripping masterpiece." - THE GUARDIAN

"A bleak and devastatingly brilliant film." - TIME OUT

"The Conversation is an intricate and unsettlingly subtle character study, with a very strong performance from Hackman." - BBC

"If you didn't catch this fabulous thriller first time round, don't miss this opportunity to see it gloriously restored on the big screen. The Conversation is a masterpiece." - THE URBAN CINEPHILE

"A film of triumphant style and overwhelming passion, white hot with American anguish." - THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER (1974)

"Brilliantly original in its basic style and mood and prophetically American in its vision of a monitored society," - NEWSWEEK (1974)

"For Hackman, Caul presents a substantial challenge. It is a largely interiorized role in contrast to the action parts in which he has recently built his career. He responds with the most substantial screen performance he has done." - TIME (1974)

WHAT COPPOLA SAID

"I wanted to make a film about privacy, using the motif of eavesdropping and wiretapping, and centering on the personal and psychological life of the eavesdropper rather than his victims. It was to be a modern horror film, with a construction based on repetition rather than exposition, like a piece of music. And it would expose a tacky, subterranean world of wiretappers: their vanities and ethics..." (in the biography Gene Hackman by Allan Hunter),

FACTS ABOUT THE FILM

- As said above, this is one of Coppola favourite of his own films, but Gene Hackman also considers this role as one of his best performances. It was not an easy role to play though: "He was really a constipated character," Hackman recalled, "It was a difficult role to play because it was so low key."

- Coppola always wanted to be a writer, this is for him a more noble profession than being a director, and this is partly why he is so proud of this film, as he wrote it. For the majority of his films, Coppola didn't write them, and he actually had to make quite a lot of them purely for financial reasons (stragely enough, for a long time in his life, he had large debts). His latest film, Tetro (2009) is the first one that he has written for a long time (and personally, I thought that it was terrible!!).

- Coppola was shocked to learn that the film utilized the very same surveillance and wire-tapping equipment that members of the Nixon Administration used to spy on political opponents prior to the Watergate scandal. However, the film was written in the 1960's, way before the Watergate scandal, although the film was released after the Watergate affair

- The film was released between The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), and did not meet great public success at the time

- The sound designer for the film is one of the best in his profession, and very famous for his work on The Conversation: Walter Murch. As The Observer said: "The distinctive quality of the soundtrack derives from one of the cinema's great editors and innovative sound designers, Walter Murch, who pays equal attention to the flapping sound of Harry Caul's plastic raincoat as to the details of the tape recording." . W. Murch won the Oscar for best sound designers for The Conversation.

INFLUENCES

This film was influenced by the film Blowup (1966) from Antonioni, in which a photographer realises that he might have taken photos of a murder, by blowing up details of his photos ina  lab.

The Conversation uses a similar concept but with audio material  - the main character tries to understand if "hidden" clues about crime appear in the recording of a conversation.

PRIZES

The Conversation won the Palme d'Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, and in 1995, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Winner of the Oscar for best film

Winner of the Oscar for best sound

Winner of the Oscar for best original screenplay

The film will be shown on a beautiful 35mm copy from the British Film Institute.

PS: For those of you who are not too familiar with film formats, 35mm projections have a special quality about them: the colours are warmer, the images are less sharp, and it gives to film that particular "film" quality, as opposed to digital or TV images. Digital projections are more and mroe common though, and do present many advantages, mainly practical and financial ones.