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In fact, the Watergate is a real building in Washington DC, but as one viewed Chinatown in 1974, “Watergate” meant the way authority might put chains and controls on water itself.Common sense is left with so few advantages. (If Deep Throat existed and wasn’t just the convenient second source employed by Woodward and Bernstein to get past their editor at The Washington Post.)Of course, “Deep Throat” is as resonant a name as “Harry Caul” and as eloquent but sinister as “Watergate”. That is just one part of the culture of surveillance, whereby so many “public” spaces actually inhibit private behaviour, and in which fly-over scrutiny can now pick out the facial features of hunted suspects.That is to say nothing of the vulnerabilities caused by a society of credit-card users, or the introduction “for public safety” of video surveillance in such places as the underground car parks where “Deep Throat” preferred to drop his hints. (See the movie to find out how.)But all of that was before such things as cable television (which can offer its owners an eye into every home); the computer, and the chance that it can be hacked into; and email, all of which is banked somewhere so that “they” can study our every impulsive message. The Conversation was partly inspired by things Coppola had learnt about new long-distance microphones, and the detailed working out of what Harry Caul (or Walter Murch) achieves was a testament to how far sound recording could pick up a last sigh at rifle range.The great allure of the film, I think, has to do with the way its own technology seems to warn us of how threatened our own supposed intimacies are – the “conversation” in question is between a young man and a young woman in San Francisco’s Union Square at a busy lunchtime Caul is able to hear every word, every hesitation And he gets the meaning only one turn wrong. In a way, Duel is the boldest of all, for it shows an essential American virtue – space itself – turning into a trap or a cruel board game where snakes’ mouths wait on innocence.Yet how innocent that age seems in comparison to ours. At the same time, no one has so surely prepared the ordinary citizen for the possibility that the circles of power harbour people whose aim is to defy the Constitution and screw the people.It was an age of assassinations and administrative outrages and deceptions, and their influence can be felt in some of the great movies of the time: I’m thinking also of The Parallax View and All the President’s Men; of Chinatown (in which the once valiant and shrewd lone private eye is confounded and left nearly deranged by the great iniquitous conspiracy that has formed Los Angeles); and Steven Spielberg’s Duel, that wonderful parable about a man on the open road who becomes hounded and pursued by a rogue truck.

He investigated the suspected spy Alger Hiss, and he later drew up an extensive list of “enemies” to his administration and psychic existence. Nixon had been an early crusader against Communist infiltration. Ironically, the entire episode of Watergate was driven by a man who was probably the most paranoid leader the country has yet had. And I do believe that in our time – I will confine this to modern American history – the US government has done terrible things in the name of preserving order.The Conversation, you should recall, opened in 1974, the year in which President Nixon was compelled by subpoena to release what we call the Watergate tapes. I would even concede that in the end it might be easier to have one obscure nut kill a president, than that a large conspiracy could pass by without, eventually, one of the gang writing a book or getting on Oprah But I don’t know. And here we come to a climatic force on which paranoia thrives – and even depends.For where there is doubt there can be speculation.

I think it was common sense, or some hunch about likely odds, that whispered to me: too much – in a police station? – before Lee Harvey Oswald could talk? I still don’t know who killed President Kennedy, and I doubt we ever will. That’s when the chill settled in my spine.Now, an attempt at orthodoxy soon circulated – that Ruby was simply another nut with a gun, another guy so upset that he thought being famous might save him, just as immediate revenge could heal the nation. Is that because real alarm is now so great that Hollywood feels the need to boost morale – to keep business going and the flag flying? In so many ways, the American movie has retreated from its own uncomfortable material.Or is it that we have become so accustomed to story and plotting that we mock those very forms? The campness in so many modern films is a none-too-gentle way of saying to the audience, don’t take this too seriously – don’t take anything too seriously That may be intended to reassure us, or tranquillise us. Some people believe their girlfriend only goes out to leave them alone, so that they may.The spiral of anxiety increases in reality, yet nowadays our movies seldom get as deep into unease as they did in the early Seventies. And even if you aren’t frozen by the thought that the cable television service is observing you – why is your girlfriend out late again?Don’t answer out loud One never knows who is listening. In undermining common sense, it begins to discount education and human judgement It leaves us that much more neurotic.

Indeed, nobody knows better than Harry the terrible vulnerabilities we submit to in making a sound

His name is Harry Caul, but he’d rather stay silent. His name is Harry Caul, but he’d rather stay silent. Why don’t movies open just like the little flag that tells us all “You’ve got mail”? Achieve that, and the Judis are off and running, and she and Oscar are a couple.d.thomson independent.co.uk. So how much longer must Britain endure the gap of months (sometimes close to a year) between the release of a film in America and its opening in London? That gap is all the more puzzling when critics at early screenings of Lord of the Rings were searched for video-cameras in the attempt to prevent pirating of the movie – in Asia and elsewhere. In real human and business terms, the countries are not just close, they’re in step. Britain and America are several hours and several thousand miles apart But that has never mattered less The phone, the fax and e-mail have withered distance. If Diana has gone out of fashion, what about a Judi after a very regular winner? But here’s another point.