6. The Conversation
Considered the best in his field, surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is tasked with bugging the exchange between a couple as they walk through Union Square in San Francisco. After realising that his client, a man known only as 'the director', is in fact keeping tabs on his wife and the man believed to be her lover, Caul worries what may come of the couple once he reports his findings. Already consumed by guilt from a previous wire-tap job, which resulted in the murder of three people, he invests himself into both the recording and its victim. Having fine-tuned the sound quality, Caul struggles to decipher the importance of one particular sentence; the emphasis leaping from one word to the next. You can see the frustration, but also the pity, in his eyes as he envisions the consequences of his work. With Caul caught between professional and moral duties, Francis Ford Coppola's part-homage to 'Blow-Up' continues the strand of a conspirator with a conscience; a voyeur as much a target as a trapper.