Gene Hackman Fansite

The Conversation is a 1974 thriller starring Gene Hackman and directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

In it Hackman plays the part of a surveillance expert with his own company. He’s hopelessly paranoid, however, and keeps everything about himself absolutely private. Even his own apartment, kept safe by thick locks, is almost completely empty for fear of intruders, save a saxophone (playing it along with jazz records is his one hobby). He finds himself constantly wracked with guilt over a past wire tap that resulted in three deaths.

So when he’s commissioned to do a job he does it, but with intense feelings of regret that the people he’s listening in on will get into trouble, or worse. He’s so reticent about handing over the tape, in fact, that the commissioning parties bug his apartment and, eventually, break in, steal the tape and leave what little they find destroyed.

That is, save for the saxophone, which the expert plays as the film closes.

The movie proved good enough to earn three Academy Nominations, not to mention preservation in the National Film Registry of the United States.