Yesterday I saw a forty year old movie called The Conversation. I missed it in theaters and I'm not sure why ... globetrotting, perhaps. Over the years I've seen it scheduled on television and heard raves about it. I put it on my 'to watch' list years ago and finally was able to see it two or three minutes into the credits.

The film has a fine cast but, probably because his film Godfather II won an Oscar that year, was lost in the dazzle. That a sequel won the award was unique and who has two classic films in one year? Francis Ford Coppola was at the top of his game, and Apocalypse Now was still five years down the road.

Yet, as organized crime becomes so accepted (legal), violent and dynastic, and veterans of the Vietnam experience get long-in-the-tooth, it may be The Conversation that emerges as most important of Coppola's films.

It is a psychological drama worthy of Hitchcock in its seductions, twists and deceptions, but it has none of the high society glamor or witty foreplay of his characters and locations. Instead Coppola makes us hunker inside a van, an abandoned factory, a lover's narrow bedroom, a hotel bathroom and finally, in the wreckage of a man's most private, closely guarded refuge, his home.

The villain's lair is a crowded noontime square and the lavish offices which overlook it. Robert Duval mysteriously plays 'The Director' and his assistant is Harrison Ford as the sinister 'Martin Stett' (both have minor rolls).

The protagonist is 'Harry Caul' (the ever engaging Gene Hackman), an increasingly paranoid professional 'listener' who films and records the private, personal lives of strangers, a lucrative business which has made him a legend in the surveillance field. Much of his paranoia is the result of competitors and their jealousies. But his fears are not without merit. Already bearing the guilt of one disastrous case, he is ever cautious about his latest targets.

The targets, moving carefully through a lunchtime crowd, are lovers played by Cindy Williams and Fredric Forest. It is their conversation which consumes Caul and drives him to a frenzy near madness. "If they have the chance they'll kill us," Caul finally squeezes from the static.

A point of interest is the degree of sophistication spy toys and electronic surveillance already possessed in 1974. One can only imagine what computer chips, miniaturization and forty years of counter-counter-counter intelligence has done to the concept of Big Brother and the Eyes and Ears of the World.

Those who listen want us to believe that if we've done nothing wrong we have nothing to fear, that government (and its corporate masters) is on our side, but when the tables are turned on Harry Caul, when he is warned "Say nothing. We are watching you," he becomes obsessed with finding the bugs, which seem to crawl invisibly all over him. In the end he sits alone, imprisoned in the debris of his apartment, a priceless place of guaranteed privacy and safety which he has, of his own fears, ripped to shreds.

Coppola is probably no more prescient than George Orwell, or Thomas Paine, or other of history's outcryers. He, likely, just made a horror film which cannily projects and reflects our present state.

Have a look when you get the chance.