Gene Hackman is Harry Caul, ’the best bugger on the West Coast’, a surveillance expert whose jealously guarded anonymity is threatened when he happens across what seems to be a murder plot.
Francis Coppola’s existential thriller had the commercial good fortune to coincide with the public airing of the Watergate tapes, but the soul-searching here is intensely personal, and the film’s investigation of privacy and corporate surveillance feels equally of the moment in our own time. For many, this movie is on a par with The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, and arguably it surpasses them. The great Walter Murch created the brilliant, densely layered sound design.
4K restoration
Harry Caul is one of the most affecting and tragic characters in the movies.
Roger Ebert
Thanks to Walter Murch’s keen, intuitive sound montage and Hackman’s clammy, subtle performance, the movie captures a more elusive and universal fear—that of losing the power to respond, emotionally and morally, to the evidence of one’s own senses.
Michael Sragow, New Yorker
A severe and gripping masterpiece.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Media Partner
Francis Ford Coppola
Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Allen Garfield, Harrison Ford
USA
1974
English
Palme d’Or, Cannes 1974
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Producer
Francis Ford Coppola
Screenwriter
Francis Ford Coppola
Cinematography
Bill Butler
Editor
Richard Chew
Original Music
David Shire
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