This film was made between “The Godfather” (1972) and “The Godfather Part II” (1974) and was a return to a small art film for Coppola. Gene Hackman plays wiretapping spy Harry Caul, who is tasked with intercepting a young couple’s conversation in the bustling Union Square in San Francisco. The words are clear, but their meaning remains a mystery that haunts Harry and plunges him into a moral crisis. Hermann Hesse’s character of Harry Haller from “Steppenwolf” inspired Coppola to become his protagonist, who is a loner and an expert in the field of interception technology, which was developing faster and faster during the Cold War. (The GDR drama “The Life of Others” also uses such a character in 2006).
A quiet thriller, with excellent montage (Walter Murch), whose atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust, combined with his obsessive loner antihero, makes it a prototype of the darker American arthouse film of the early 70s and has hit the nerve of the times, especially against the backdrop of the Watergate wiretapping scandal in the US. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1974.
The Theme of the film by David Shire is also exceptional: