The Conversation at 50: Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid and predictive masterpiece

The 1974 suspense thriller smartly predicted the increasing importance of technology and lack of privacy in our lives......"Produced between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, The Conversation was the only film that Coppola made in that peerless decade (which he ended with Apocalypse Now) that he scripted alone, without drawing from a literary source. As such, it feels uniquely personal, even for a director who famously invests so much of himself, creatively and financially, in his art. Though the film isn’t officially adapted from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blow-Up, Coppola does for sound what Antonioni did for picture, using one incomplete morsel of information to get at a truth that proves persistently elusive. It’s a potent metaphor for the movies themselves, which make an art of constructing reality from disassembled pieces, but it also speaks to a wider sense of unease that was gripping the culture at the time."