THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
THE GOOD WORD 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN Though Francis Ford Coppola says that he began working on the script for The Conversation in 1966, it is hardly fortuitous that the film...
...The film is not only about words, but seems to have been conceived wholly from words--to have been brought into finished form while still in the scriptwriting and planning stage...
...and we must not profanr their lives...
...No work of art that appears to have been made without any spontaneity can seem trustworthy...
...These need not detain us...
...But the remark could as well be a sudden disclosure of Harry's ever-secret thoughts, an articulation of his vague and distracted feelings about the routine, unprovocative way in which the prostitute is undressing...
...It is therefore a very shrewd bit of timing to release The Conversation, a project over which he had complete control and with which he is clearly pleased, just when he needs a lifeboat to escape from the titanic disaster of the Fitzgerald adaptation...
...Harry is a freelance eavesdropper who has a personal mania for privacy...
...You're supposed to tease me," says the woman on the tape, referring to a gift her lover wants to keep as a surprise for her...
...What messes up Harry's fastidious life is the way that this compartmentalization begins to disintegrate on him...
...film schooI--Coppola is a surprisingly literary director...
...The result this time is a film perhaps too neatly rendered to be completely satisfying: a film that is too clean, too perfect...
...As Coppola has imagined it, the profession of snooping is an extremely paradoxical one...
...On the contrary, the client gets the last word, as it were, by putting Harry himself under surveillance and compromising him as he has done others...
...In the end Harry's client doesn't prove to be who Harry thought it was...
...Victim and victimizer change places, and Harry's fate is seen to be like that of the miscreants condemned in Dante's Inferno to the nether circles, where the punishment is always inspired by the sin itself...
...There are genuine monsters in Studs Terkel's new collection of tape-recorded interviews, which are less interviews than they are monologues and reveries --people running on about their lives, as if this is the moment they've been waiting for a long time, a chance to tell someone, anyone, a stranger with a machine, about how it is with them: "what they do all day and how they feel about what they do...
...Above all, the experience, when one has risen again from the slough of despond, moves one to wonder, with something like awe, that the human creature can be so subdued, so flattened and emptied of vital fires as to submit his brief life to the carnivorous timeclock, to measure his freedom by the ten-minute coffee breaks, ultimate happiness by a pink bathroom, a flagstone fireplace, an A-frame cabin at the lakeside...
...He has been a writer on over twenty films, though he has directed only six or seven...
...Harry lives in a world of gobbledy-gook sound which it is his job to render intelligible, and Coppola's film is also, in a sense, a pattern of sounds gradually revealing their intelligibility...
...Monsters outright: zombies and psychopaths, fully processed hirelings so bought and paid4or, such wholly-owned subsidiaries, that they would no more think to question the rightness of things-as-theyare than would the man in Personnel, or the time-motion statistician...
...an eschatologist of everyman...
...or not (Gatsby, Patton...
...They're people, not The People: how, then, is it possible to see them truly, without hypocrisy or sentimentality, condescension or the moist pity that scarcely conceals contempt...
...They're only doing their jobs...
...Later on, when he bugs that hotel room, Harry thinks he hears a murder committed...
...praised novel, Heartland (Scribner's...
...The Conversation is a very precise film, and if it has any fault it is only that it is even more precise than it need be...
...It makes a certain sense to suppose that Coppola does indeed work this way, for he is always working as a scriptwriter whether he is also directing (The Rain People, The Godfather, et al...
...In a long, rather documentary sequence early in the film, we see Harry working on three different tapes of the conversation referred to in the title, a lunch-hour chat that some illicit lovers have had in a public plaza...
...and indeed he has heard one, but not the one he thinks...
...Patiently Harry screens, shunts and fidgets with the tapes until he has retrieved from their squawks and blurts everything that was said...
...Like the conversations that Harry Caul eavesdrops on, this film seems to record life at a great distance and by purely mechanical means...
...Got him...
...He didn't have a leg to stand on," he says...
...The gung-ho "undercover industrial investigator" (read company spy) has just brilliantly succeeded, by squatting in a dark corner atop a refrigerator for four days, working eight-hour shifts, in collaring the culprit who'd been stealing butter from the bakery...
...though it would probably leave untouched all celebrants of the "work ethic," that Aesopian obscenity, but only because they are untouchable...
...On a troubled night when he lets a prostitute come up to his workshop, they listen to the tape while she seduces hlm, and its furtive conversation begins to sound like dialogue for their furtive lovemaking...
...However impressed we may be with Coppola's control over his material, we don't come away from the film feeling that he has even Harry Caul's pathetic capacity to let his passions interfere with his work...
...Reading a thick book devoted entirely to the actual workaday lives of a wide spectrum of flesh-andbone persons should if justice and reason prevailed on earth make tupamaros of teamsters, Maoists of insurance salesmen, revolutionaries of certified public accountants, anarchists of orthodontists, Marcuseans of deacons, Reichians of computer programmers and bank tellers...
...The Conversation is a film that works on lots of different levels, the motifs of Coppola's design for the film all being perfectly synthesized in the final product the way that the different channels of a recording session are blended and balanced on a stereophonic tape...
...Coppola had no control over how his script for Gatsby was directed and must have known from the start that, whatever Gatsby might do for his pocketbook, it wouldn't add to his reputation...
...For someone whose training was exclusively cinematic--he even has a degree from the U.C.L.A...
...He lives almost tracelessly in an efficiency apartment, and his only intimate is a mistress whom he obviously loves...
...At a moment when Harry has been put in a very isolated, vulnerable position by one of his clients, the hush of wind that one hears riding in an elevator becomes a shrieking, sighing force...
...Like the timing of its release, the film itself seems so calculated that we cannot help suspecting it of being disingenuous...
...As Harry should know by now--to say nothing of us in the audience--words alone are ambiguous, misleading, hard to get the drift of, even when they are at last heard distinctly...
...The sound effects in the film are extraordinary...
...Another time, after Harry has bugged a hotel room in which a murder is being committed, he wakes up to find a TV set on, the face on the screen shouting at him at full volume like some great, electronic conscience...
...What a masterpiece we have created--the boy who without a murmur will sell shoes and load crates for fifty years, die smiling with a shoe in his hands, a crate in his arms, the girl filing her life away, typing her fingertips spatulate, the ribbon like entrails unwinding...
...Work, not death, is the wages of sin...
...The genius of the social order: the process called "socialization" by which a 16-year-old, blood rampant, fluids raging, can stare down the long corridor of his/her certain life and walk willingly into the darkness, even choose to do so, accept it as if it were the only possible path, foreI SAUL MALOFF is the author o] the highly...
...When I got up and took the stand, my testimony destroyed him...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...What is still astonishing is the humanity that survives in some pretty unlikely places...
...Faced with work, but with Work conceived by an economy of abundance (and rigged scarcity) stockpiling trash skyhigh and heeldeep--Work can make theologians, and rhetoricans and bad poets, of us all...
...T H;agTEMPTATION nOW that Work at last---or again--hecome a central issue in serious discourse, is to bring to bear upon it all the heavy conceptual apparatus: the young Marx of the Paris Manuscripts on alienation...
...1 love you," says the tape ironically...
...We're spending too much time here," it self-replies, again with an ironic relevance to Harry's dilemma...
...caught him redhanded...
...Yet when she asks him a few personal questions, he abandons even her...
...When he starts to suspect that the client for whom he has recorded that young couple's tryst will murder them as a result, his own life and the two lives he has come to know only through the tapes begin to inter-penetrate...
...How can it be that we are not all Luddites...
...It is a film about an electronic eavesdropper named Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), and as such it is, on the first level, a film of and about sound...
...His agency had given him a week for the job: "I never thought I'd finish the case Commonweal: 215...
...Of course there is a certain confusion in this scene between Harry's life and the tape, for it is the woman's voice, not the man's, that seems to be speaking for Harry...
...A top practitioner of the most modernly amoral profession conceivable, Harry is also a rather old-fashioned Catholic with a simple (if sometimes lax) faith...
...obligatory reference to Civilization and Its Discontents, R. H. Tawney, Max Weber, assorted neo-Freudians and neo-Marxists...
...This ambiguity of men's and women's roles turns out to be relevant too, however...
...For all its quality (or maybe because of 3 May 1974:214 it), The Conversation never gives us the feeling that its director was deflected by mental struggle in making it...
...THE GOOD WORD 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN Though Francis Ford Coppola says that he began working on the script for The Conversation in 1966, it is hardly fortuitous that the film itself should appear now, on the heels of The Great Gatsby...
...He keeps his life so compartmentalized that, as one facet of the film's montage illustrates, he can go directly from deciphering other people's secrets in his workshop to disclosing his own secrets in the confessional...
...But these aren't concepts or factors of production...
...WOBE woxK,NO -- 0][~' ( I STUDS TERKEL ~O~U f ~ Pantheon, $10 i l SAUL MALOF _ _ , ordained, necessary, morally good-without shaking a fist at Providence, cursing God, storming the ramparts, taking to the hills, getting out of town, blowing up the earth, poisoning the reservoir, getting high and staying there, never coming down except to man and woman and child the barricades...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 9
