How
It Rates
Kansas City Star, August, 1980
*
*
The
Human Factor, a
drama, contains some profanity and a brief scene of female nudity but is largely
inoffensive. (Audience rating: PG) Now showing
at the Bijou Theater. Screenplay by
Tom Stoppard, produced and directed by Otto Preminger and released by MGM, with
the following principal players: Nicol
Williamson, Richard Attenborouogh, Robert Morley, Derek Jacobi, Iman, John
Gielgud.
“The Human Factor” is just good enough to send you off to find its
source, Graham Greene’s novel. It
has all the earmarks of an unsuccessful screen adaptation of a very good book.
That The Human Factor didn’t
make a very satisfying movie is understandable—it is short on action and long
on psychology and politics—not exactly the stuff of which exciting movies are
made.
But if “The Human Factor,” which opens a two-day run today at the
Bijou Theater, isn’t a very good film (though it is one of director Otto
Preminger’s more restrained efforts), its ideas are certainly tantalizing.
The topic here is loyalty to country versus loyalty to one’s fellows
(the two are hardly the same thing, after all) and the setting is, once again,
the British Secret Service. Only on
this trip we’ll not encounter any gunplay, garrotings or explosions. “The Human Factor” unfolds in a world of stuffy
bureaucracy rather than that of international derring-do, though the dangers are
hardly diminished. In the field
they can only kill you; safe in the corporate-styled world behind the lines they
can destroy your soul.
Castle (Nicol Williamson) is a good gray paper shuffler, now bound to a
desk after several years spent spying in Africa for “the firm.”
He has a black wife and son at home—the result of his assignment to the
Dark Continent—and is, by all accounts, a loyal, unimaginative employee.
But when the firm’s security forces start sniffing out a leak in
Castle’s section, he gets nervous. And
when his assistant dies mysteriously, Castle becomes alarmed—for then we learn
that he has for years been passing on information to the Russians.
His superiors mistakenly tagged his aide as the leaker and had him neatly
eliminated.
Screenwriter/playwright Tom Stoppard has an uncanny ear for the tensions
and threats percolating just beneath the banal surface of proper British
niceties—conversations that seem chummy but are filled with hidden daggers.
However, he has been unable to find an effective cinematic way of
presenting Castle’s background so that we understand his betrayal of country.
Instead, Stoppard, two-thirds of the way into the film, plops down a long
and somewhat confusing series of flashback scenes detailing Castle’s
activities in Africa. Granted, they do explain his actions, but only in a clumsy
and rather irritating manner.
The acting by all involved is quite good.
Williamson is fine as the colorless fellow whose only love is for wife
and son, and Robert Morley and Richard Attenborough are excellent—Morley as a
conscienceless spymaster, Attenborough as the security chief who can’t quite
accept “liquidation” as an acceptable method.
Derek Jacobi, one of England’s most underrated actors, is marvelous as
Castle’s ill-fated assistant, and Iman, the black model-actress, is acceptable
as Castle’s wife, though she doesn’t seem quite at home before the camera.