The return of The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 movie, in a new 4K restoration at Film Forum and the IFC Center reminds us of when America had a conscience. What reputation the film has is largely thanks to the coincidence that it was released in the spring of 1974 just before President Nixon resigned in response to the Watergate scandal — as if Coppola’s film about secretive wiretapper Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) had somehow predicted or addressed the Watergate burglars and wiretappers.

Back in ’74, The Conversation rode the nation’s cresting mood of disbelief and disillusionment. In Europe, the left-leaning Cannes Film Festival awarded Coppola the Palme d’Or as if congratulating his prescience and left-wing skepticism.

The Conversation was always more respected than popular; the Watergate myth (promulgated by partisan media) survives as the root of today’s disastrous collusion between the government and the press. That makes The Conversation worth revisiting to clarify political delusions — separating Coppola’s art achievement from partisan conceit.

Wiretapper Caul was Coppola’s idea of an American cipher, an enigmatic figure so lacking in personal responsibility that he can be used by nefarious others. (The idea came from Harry Haller, the protagonist of Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf, popular among discontented students of Coppola’s generation.) Coppola’s contemplation of Caul’s professionalism accounts for the film’s unusual quiet. Listening is part of Caul’s expertise when he surreptitiously records interpersonal exchanges.

The spectacularly choreographed opening aerial sequence, set at San Francisco’s Union Square, closes in on passersby and then focuses on a woman and man (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) in a secret assignation that is being filmed and recorded by Caul and his team of eavesdroppers. It’s the film’s centerpiece, repeated throughout Caul’s expert manipulation of electronic recording technology, the means by which he captures the world while remaining detached from it.

The Conversation was made in the afterglow of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), ostensibly a murder mystery but really a sexy, excitingly aestheticized study of mid-century cultural change: A fashion photographer accidentally captures a murder and tries to prove or disprove its certainty. Blow-Up was a milestone hit, inspiring the next generation of filmmakers to explore their means of perception and address moral responsibility in films such as The Conversation and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out.

In that period known as “the Heroic Age of Moviegoing,” viewers expected films to challenge ethical behavior. (“How shall we live?” Antonioni posited at the beginning of La Notte.)

With The Conversation, Coppola brought in the moral responsibility that was missing from the intense and absorbing The Godfather — exactly the dramatic experiment necessary before going on to complicate the ethnic gangster saga in The Godfather, Part II.

Consider Caul’s Catholicism — his correcting colleagues’ profane language, his guilt-ridden sexual discretion, his defensive sense of honor when keeping professional secrets, and his nervous job reflexes: “It had nothing to do with me. . . . What they do with the tapes is their own business.” Caul dodges the history of a past assignment in which he bugged a Teamsters president in 1968, which ended with three people dead.

Caul is a case study in 1970s apathy — political alienation that gave way to Millennial activism and the narcissistic concern with “community” derived from the current fascination with communist precepts. Hackman balances Caul’s enigmatic persona with his private turmoil, every scene deepening into solitary emotional tension. Sequences intercutting Caul at his editing console show us what Harry is thinking, what he’s imagining.

Coppola simultaneously deconstructs the process of filmmaking as part of the movie’s aesthetic excitement and narrative drama — mystery, discovery, ambiguity, morality. The highpoint of Caul’s murder investigation (he rents a hotel room next to the murder site) is a toilet overflowing with a dead man’s blood. It’s an excessive scene of psychic horror not even justified by Kubrick’s exaggeration of it through that blood-flooding elevator in The Shining.

Seen today, a half century later, The Conversation is less striking for its pseudo-Watergate legend than its precise evocation of professional hypocrisy. Caul’s wiretapping profession is at the heart of the Russian-collusion hoax that has destabilized recent American politics.

Electronic surveillance itself doesn’t make The Conversation a political film; Caul’s paranoia comes from his apolitical pretense. A techies’ convention scene normalizes the practice of eavesdropping, and a private after-party among professionals heightens Caul’s panic. Here’s how the film concerns personal, spiritual betrayal, which Coppola pushes to physical extremes: A young Harrison Ford appears as a treacherous gay factotum in a tug-of-war with Caul, then Caul suspects that he himself has been bugged, and he demolishes his own apartment. Genius symbolism: He even rips apart a Holy Madonna statuette while searching to find a bugging device, a sign of conscience.

We could do with more filmmakers inspired by Antonioni, Coppola, and De Palma to investigate the motives of contemporary journalists and public servants who detach themselves from the morality of their actions.