The Conversation Movie Review Summary

Harry Caul is San Francisco's best 'bugging' expert - there's no one he can't spy on, there's no conversation he can't listen to. When he's asked to spy on a young couple, he discovers that things aren't always as they seem - and that remaining unaffected by the subjects he spies on is impossible.

The review of this Movie prepared by Cassie Whittell

Harry Caul (Hackman) is a surveillance expert. His job is to collect confidential information for clients without asking any questions. The film opens with his latest challenging job: capturing the conversation of a couple as they weave through crowds and street performers in Union Square, San Francisco, at noon. As he clarifies and pieces together their conversation, a sense of dire threat to the young man and woman grows on him, and -- haunted by a previous job that resulted in the death of a family -- he becomes emotionally involved in the task. Harry is very much a loner -- isolated and a little paranoid. We meet some of his colleagues, and several women (one played by youthful Terri Garr) that swirl meaninglessly through his life. Fresh-faced Harrison Ford, 32 and just out of "American Grafitti," plays his contact with the client executive (an uncredited appearance by Robert Duvall). Cindy Williams, a few years from "Laverne and Shirley" is the young woman in the conversation. Crack editor and sound man Walter Murch received a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for this 1974 film where sound does many different things. On the eve of the Watergate affair, Francis Ford Coppola wrote and directed this quiet masterpiece -- slow, stately, yet tense and frightening, with sudden rare bursts of motion and sound -- using the profits from his first two Godfather pictures.

The review of this Movie prepared by David Loftus