Coppola’s “The Conversation” is the brilliant paranoid thriller he made in between “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II.” Creatively, he was on fire. From shot composition to casting to design to music, he knew precisely what these films required.
Every element of “The Conversation” is extraordinary, but David Shire’s nerve-jangling, piano-heavy score (interspersed with some jazzy cues) goes a long way toward setting the viewer on edge. The deeper Gene Hackman’s surveillance expert Harry Caul plunges into a mystery of his own making, the tighter your jaw clenches.
I’ll confess that I don’t hear a lot of Shire’s “The Conversation” in Beltrami’s “Logan” theme. The instrumentation — piano, guitar, drums and harmonica — sounds like a melancholy mix of Ennio Morricone and John Carpenter. But foregrounding the piano on a superhero score is incredibly rare, so if “The Conversation” was Mangold’s starting point (which he claimed during a live-tweet viewing of “Logan” in 2000) when discussing the music with Beltrami (who also scored the director’s “3:10 to Yuma,” “The Wolverine,” and “Ford v Ferrari”), then that’s wonderful. The result is all that matters, and “Logan” might be Beltrami’s finest composition.
