It’s hard to place the grand, cosmic forces that decide whether or not a film is considered a classic. And I’m not talking about classic even in the film critic sense, critics use the term, surprisingly, even more loosely than the public does, and many films that are revered in the press never enter the general consciousness, not to mention the revered, reserved spot of the great classics. Classics, there is no question, have earned their place at the top, but I find more interesting the films that failed to complete the climb into public discourse, despite equal (or greater) quality than the titans staring down at them. These are the Citizen Kanes, the Chinatowns, The Apocalypse Nows.

A film whose name is far less known if Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation,” a bleak, modern noir film about paranoia and perspective. It serves us best to contrast the film with “Apocalypse Now,” a film that was also critically acclaimed, but also was able to make a climb, come out on the right side of the strange, ethereal judgement humanity makes to call a film a classic.

Obviously, I’m abstracting the issue. There are some real reasons why “Apocalypse Now” was more popular. It was an epic war film with helicopters in the sky and and a grand journey, inspired by “Heart of Darkness,” a novel the public had already deemed classic. It was about the Vietnam War, a war that had only ended four years before its release, a war that almost the entire audience had lived through, been affected by, felt, experienced. Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen were in it. The film promised much and delivered all of it.

But “The Conversation” is beautiful in a way “Apocalypse Now” isn’t: in narrative. Perhaps “Heart of Darkness” had some of this beauty, but “Apocalypse Now” gave preferential treatment to aesthetics, images and wide shots of helicopters dropping bombs. It’s journey over destination, which may be a virtue in life, but in film it feels like a sin.

What could be less grand: Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a respected surveillance expert, constantly paranoid about others surveying him, quiet and withdrawn, bland, balding. On the job for a mysterious client, he overhears a couple talking fearfully, talking about someone who intends to murder them, someone Caul decides is the very client that he has been hired by. The film has him grappling with this conversation, from disregarding it to seeing it for what it really is.

While “Apocalypse Now” deals with themes that have existed at least since the publication of “Heart of Darkness” in 1899, “The Conversation” deals with ideas that are becoming increasingly relevant. Surveillance, paranoia, how the modern world blurs the line between imagination in truth; these ideas are neglected in modern film even as they are monumental in modern society. “The Conversation” also tells a complete, satisfying thriller story, with twists and tone comparable (but superior to) films popular now–”Gone Girl,” “Shutter Island” and every Christopher Nolan movie.

There are no helicopters in the sky. There’s no Vietnam jungle, and any journey overtaken is a mental one. Perhaps “The Conversation” was destined never to be a classic ever since it lost to “The Godfather Part II” (another Coppola film) for Best Picture in 1974. But this film deserves, I think, to be looked up to, to enter the public consciousness, now more than ever.