50 Movies Where Evil Won

Plot: Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a surveillance expert, hears some words that hint that a murder might be about to happen, and he spirals into paranoia. 

Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation is a potent and ingeniously put-together surveillance thriller featuring arguably the best performance that the late Gene Hackman - one of the greatest actors who ever lived - ever gave, as well as an unforgettably bleak ending. 

The Conversation isn't as violent as Coppola's other 1970s masterpieces, but it's just as disturbing. At the start, Harry is already struggling with guilt due to a previous surveillance job going wrong and resulting in several deaths, and by the end, he's partly responsible for yet another fatality. 

A client instructs him to record his wife and her lover, and Harry misinterprets their conversation. He believes that they're in danger of being murdered and tries to withhold the tapes, but he realizes all too late that they were the killers, not his client, who's murdered by the couple. 

Harry is then phoned by another villain named Martin Stett (a pre-Star Wars Harrison Ford), who warns him not to interfere further and that they'll be listening. He reveals that Harry's been bugged, and Harry then destroys his apartment, searching in vain for the device. 

The final shot is absolutely chilling: Harry sits in his wrecked apartment playing his saxophone, the only thing he still has any control over... or maybe not. It's often been theorized that the bug was in the saxophone itself.