Fifty years after its release, Francis Ford Coppola’s thriller now feels prophetic in its portrait of surveillance culture.

Between the heights of critical acclaim and box office success of The Godfather and The Godfather Part 2, Coppola wrote and directed this intimate study of paranoia which spoke to the wider unease around the Watergate scandal.

Gene Hackman, who was one of the busiest actors of the decade moving between the mainstream and films of the New Hollywood such as Night Moves, provides one of his most iconic performances as Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who has a crisis of conscience when he suspects that a couple he is spying on will be murdered.

Working again with legendary sound editor Walter Murch, Coppola crafts an increasingly tense film which filters America’s political anxieties through a man who uncovers what is going on, but is powerless to do anything about it.

A new 4K restoration c/o StudioCanal fully approved by Francis Ford Coppola. The Original Negative was accessed for the first time and scanned in 4k. An approved reference print was used for the colour grading and the 5.1 soundtrack was created in 2000 by Walter Murch.

Musician Adrian Utley has a lifelong passion for cinema with his own music inspired and influenced by film music. He joins Cinema Rediscovered Founder and season curator Mark Cosgrove to discuss David Shire’s jazz inflected disquieting score at the start of the screening.

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