The Conversation is remarkably ambitious and serious—a Hitchcockian thriller, a first-rate psychological portrait of a distinctive modern villain (a professional eavesdropper) and a bitter attack on American business values, all in one movie. I feel that Coppola has partially botched the thriller, but the film is a triumph none the less—gritty, complex, idiosyncratic…. The Conversation, which is about a man rather like Watergate bugger James McCord, profits from the great American natio...

Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation is a perplexing film about a wiretapper named Harry Caul who becomes involved in a murder. Harry is less a character in the traditional sense than he is a symbol or cipher for modern man immersed in a technological society that undermines human values and thwarts human needs. As a technician in this dehumanizing environment, Harry seems unwilling or unable to relate to people or to take the moral action necessary to change his life or even save the lives of oth...

[The Conversation calls strongly to mind] Antonioni's 1966 film, Blow-Up. Though this is most obvious in the actual "blow-up" (i.e., tape-deciphering) sequence itself, the resemblance extends from the painterly look of the film (some of the shots in Harry's apartment have an almost Vermeer-like quality of sculptured light) to such small details as the appearance of a mime in the opening sequence who seems to constitute a quite pointed reference to the mimes whose appearances brac...

[Much of The Conversation] is very well-made…. There is, of course, no James Bond glamour, and yet Coppola also manages not to show off his sense of realism in any ostentatious manner. It is understated, subtle and at times probing. But when he starts in with the whodunit nonsense, the whole film begins to fall apart. Replacing the cool intellectual detachment, there emerges a frenetic paranoia wildly hopping about….