Sounds of Silence

By JAY COCKS

THE CONVERSATION Directed and Written by FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

Harry Caul, an electronic eavesdropper, for once lets someone listen to him. In the confessional he says to the priest, "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I have taken newspapers from their racks without paying. I've deliberately taken pleasure in impure thoughts." Then, in a great, garbled rush of feeling, he admits that he is involved in "some work"--work that may bring harm to a couple of young people. He does not wait for the priest to absolve him, however. He just mutters that he will be "in no way responsible."

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) has a pathological passion for his own privacy. That has its vocational advantages, of course--"the best bugger on the West Coast" ought to be as anonymous as possible. Beyond this, though, Caul's insulation is a way of sealing himself off from his own guilt. There is blood already on his expert hands. An earlier surveillance operation resulted in the murder of an accountant, his wife and kids. Harry begins to see their specters in his new assignment: to record an apparently innocuous conversation between a young woman (Cindy Williams) and a man (Frederic Forrest) in a busy San Francisco park. As Caul plays and replays the conversation, he hears intimations of threat, nuances of violence, and he starts to fear for the couple's safety.

The Conversation is a film of enormous enterprise and tension. It also gains, because of Watergate, an added timeliness, but it does not depend on it. More than anything, it is a film about moral paralysis, a subject that does not need headlines to lend it importance.

On its simplest level, The Conversation works as a subtle psychological thriller to which Coppola has given a musical construction. The conversation in the park is replayed at intervals throughout the movie--like a theme that gains color and resonance from what has preceded and surrounds it. The conversation begins to crumble Caul's rigorous defenses, and threatens the careful distance that he preserves between his profession and his conscience. Harry's misgivings are refracted in a series of visual metaphors: the confessional, for instance, becomes not only a tentative purging but also another ritual of ruptured privacy, of secrets overheard. Outside Harry's apartment window, a power shovel digs, an image that will be deepened and expanded at the film's end when Caul becomes the victim of his own technological virtuosity.

With The Godfather, Coppola became a superb film craftsman. Here, as before, he has had some excellent assistance--most notably that of Production Designer Dean Tavoularis and Editor Walter Murch, who worked not only on structuring the film but also on its disquieting sound track. Noises--odd and ominous, never quite real--become progressively more unsettling.

The film is meticulously cast. Special note should be taken of John Cazale, who is so subtle and adept as Caul's foggy assistant that he seems once again (he was the brother Fredo in The Godfather) to be among the best young character actors. For Hackman, Caul presents a substantial challenge. It is a largely interiorized role in contrast to the action parts on which he has recently built his career. He responds with the most sustained screen performance he has done. "Jay Cocks

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