Hackman’s surveillance expert Harry Caul is inexpressibly sad and lonely – a classic and poignant American everyman

God’s surveillance is everywhere: this is the thought that weighs heavily on bugging expert and practising Catholic Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s eerie 1974 classic, now on rerelease. It was a movie that intuited Watergate-era paranoia and disillusion: at the nadir of his despair, Harry ends up smashing a figure of the Blessed Virgin in his apartment because he suspects it contains a listening device. The Conversation contains an unforgettable performance from Gene Hackman as Caul: in his glasses and moustache, drab suit, white shirt and tie with clear plastic mac worn indoors, it is a classic and poignant “American everyman” portrayal, to put alongside Ernest Borgnine in Delbert Mann’s Marty from 1955 or Paul Walter Hauser in Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell from 2019. He probably inspired Ulrich Mühe’s East...