In 1972, on an otherwise quiet June evening, five men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington D.C., intending to photograph campaign documents and wiretap the phones. Though it’s debatable whether Nixon knew of the plan concocted by G. Gordon Liddy ahead of time, he certainly knew about the cover-up. The scandal, soon to be known as Watergate, would bring an ignominious end to his presidency. But something else memorable happened that year: Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather came out in theaters. It would go on to be number one at the box office and win three Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Two tumultuous years later, Nixon was barreling towards his August resignation and Coppola’s follow up, The Conversation, about a paranoid freelance wiretapper named Harry Caul, was released. The subject matter might seem too convenient to be a coincidence but apparently it was – the script was written back in the mid-sixties and filming was completed several months before the most damning Watergate stories broke in the press. Perhaps it’s better instead to think of it as kismet; shot down and dirty on his home turf of San Francisco before he began work on the Godfather sequel, Coppola was picking up on something ambient in the air of that era – something both sinister and melancholy. The result would be one of his greatest and most personal works.

As played by Gene Hackman, Harry Caul is a man who strives above all to remain anonymous, both in his professional and personal life. Partly inspired by real-life surveillance technology expert Martin Kaiser, who also served as a consultant on the film, Harry has no attachments, no agendas, and no opinions. "I don’t care what they’re talking about," he insists early on to his only colleague, Stan (John Cazale). "All I want is a nice fat recording." He’s widely respected by others in the industry, but wary of sharing his knowledge. He likes to think of himself as a man of integrity, which can make him vulnerable to deception. He’s also deeply religious, living a mostly monastic existence and scolding others for taking the Lord’s name in vain.

When we meet Harry, he’s in the midst of eavesdropping on a young couple (played by Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams) in Union Square. The slow zoom into the plaza that opens The Conversation is justly famous; it’s also unnerving to watch as a modern viewer, a potent reminder that all public spaces are zones of surveillance now. It’s not immediately evident who we’re looking for or listening to as voices and electronic glitches begin infiltrating the sound mix (which somehow did not win Walter Murch an Oscar), but eventually a mime picks Harry out of a crowd and a careful choreography begins. The parallels between the profession of director and surveillance expert – the meticulous eye for detail, the maniacal need for control of an environment, the perfectionism – surely weren’t lost on Coppola. In some ways, the scene feels like a stealth love letter to the labor of cinema itself; the manpower and arrangement required to make a single surreptitious tape is similar to that needed to make a movie.

A movie, though, is eventually shared with others. Harry’s tape will only be heard by his client, a man known as "The Director," whom he soon begins to suspect has malevolent intentions towards the couple. It’s not long before Harry becomes dangerously entangled in their fates – his work, we learn, has inadvertently led to the deaths of people before. The more obsessed he becomes, the more isolated he grows, and the more Coppola’s staging isolates him as well. Where before Harry was dwarfed by his surroundings so he seemed alone even in a roomful of people, by the end he sometimes feels like the only man left in San Francisco. In its most horrific and destabilizing moments, The Conversation has more in common with Rosemary’s Baby than many of the 1970’s political thrillers that followed it.

With its reliance on landlines and payphones, The Conversation might seem dated to audiences fifty years later, at least at first glance. But more often it plays out like a warning that we haven’t heeded. Harry’s insistence on his technology’s superiority blinds him to its shortcomings, often at the expense of his humanity. The choice of last name feels significant: a caul is part of the amniotic sac that encloses a fetus in the womb. Harry is unformed, but tragically incapable of recognizing it. Not when his girlfriend knows he’s coming because of the specific way he unlocks the door. Not when a competitor plants a recording device on him at a convention. And not when words are open to interpretation, even if they sound definitive. The last line of the film is delivered to Harry by a voice on the telephone: "We’ll be listening to you." These days, Siri doesn’t even do us the courtesy of letting us know. Tear up the floorboards and rip out the electrical wiring all you want. If the bug’s gotten into your head, you can’t get it out anyway.

"The Conversation" is streaming on PlutoTV and available for digital rental or purchase.

Sara Batkie

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Sara Batkie is the author of the story collection 'Better Times,' which won the 2017 Prairie Schooner Prize and is available from University of Nebraska Press. She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University. Born in Bellevue, Washington and raised mostly in Iowa, Sara currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin.