Film Forum

U.S., 1974
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola
Starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Harrison Ford, Terri Garr, Frederic Forrest
WINNER Cannes Film Festival – Palme d’Or, 1974
NOMINEE Academy Awards® – Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound, 1975 
Approx. 113 min. 35mm/4K restoration

“He’d kill us if he had the chance.” Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece of sustained suspense and paranoia, starring Gene Hackman as a loner surveillance expert. Hackman’s Harry Caul bugs a couple in San Francisco’s teeming Union Square—but why? A recluse living alone in an empty apartment, Caul plays saxophone to jazz records and broods over the deaths he may have been responsible for. And as he keeps tinkering with the recordings, he gets bugged himself, his tapes are stolen, his landlord effortlessly penetrates his security to leave a note—and then, to his horror, he figures it out.

Reviews

“DEVASTATINGLY BRILLIANT.”
– Tony Rayns, Time Out

“A TRIUMPH… GRITTY, COMPLEX, IDIOSYNCRATIC.”
– David Denby

“A GRIPPING MASTERPIECE.”
– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“An immaculate thriller, a study in paranoia and loneliness, partly inspired by Antonioni’s BLOW-UP, and released as the Watergate scandal was unfolding, [with] one of Gene Hackman’s greatest performances.”
– Philip French, The Guardian

“When it premiered, the movie’s technological tricks and sleek corporate backdrop evoked Watergate. Thanks to Walter Murch’s keen, intuitive sound montage and Hackman’s clammy, subtle performance, 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, The New Yorker

“Harry ranks with Willy Loman in DEATH OF A SALESMAN or the pathetic captives of the middle class in John Cassavetes’ FACES.”
– Roger Ebert

“Remarkably ambitious and serious—a Hitchcockian thriller, a first-rate psychological portrait of a distinctive modern villain, and a bitter attack on American business values… all in one movie.”
– David Denby