Review – The Conversation

This odd little movie from Francis Ford Coppola doesn’t often get the attention it deserves. To be sure, it’s not “easy viewing” like The Godfather. But in many ways it’s a better, more thought-provoking film. Gene Hackman plays an audio surveillance expert hired to record a conversation between a wealthy man’s wife and her lover. When the straightforward job starts developing strange complications, he becomes more and more convinced that his client intends to kill his unfaithful wife and her boyfriend. Hackman underplays the role almost to a fault, his deadness sometimes making the character hard to sympathize with (though still much better than the histrionics some other actors would no doubt have brought to the part). The story is slow, and it springs a leak or two in places. For example, why would a character like this ever accept a pen as a free gift from a rival bug-maker? Weaknesses aside, however, Coppola does a masterful job of lighting the “paranoid menace” burner and then ever so slowly turning up the heat. Worth seeing