Between the critical and financial success of “The Godfather” (1972) and “The God- father Part II” (1974), Francis Ford Coppola, their director, producer and co-screenwriter with Mario Puzo, author of the novel with the same title, was able to secure the money ($1.6 million) to produce and direct his screenplay for “The Conversation” (1974), that he wrote in the mid-1960s.

A highly regarded surveillance industry ex- pert, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), and his assistant Stan (the late John Cazale) are hired by a director of a large corporation (uncredited cameo appearance by Robert Duvall) to eavesdrop on the private conversations of a young couple. The movie’s opening scene is filmed from above a crowded Union Square in San Francisco with people playing, singing, sleeping, talking and walking across the square, including Caul wearing his plastic gray raincoat, Caul’s surveillance crew is on the ground and above the square with their surveillance micro- phones and tape recorders. The young couple Caul was hired to photograph, electronically spy on, eavesdrop and tape record Ann (Cindy Williams) and Mark (Frederic Forrest).

In 1952 during the Korean War, American, Russian and Chinese Communists conspire to nominate and elect a candidate for president of the United States. The Russian Army captures a U.S. Army squad of about 10 soldiers and flies them by helicopter to a Chinese Communist indoctrination center in Manchuria. The entire group is conditioned or “brainwashed” to follow orders. The brainwashing apparently works when they have one member of the squad kill the person he likes best. However, the conspirators realize that over time their chosen instrument or agent must be periodically tested to determine whether their selected instrument will again follow orders and kill on command their selected victims.