The Human Factor (1979)

          Like many iconic directors who began their careers in the studio era, Otto Preminger fared poorly in the ’70s—with each successive picture, his old-fashioned style seemed more and more disconnected from current trends. Adding to the problem was the filmmaker’s apparent creative fatigue, because Preminger’s final films are even more static and talky than the ones he made in his heyday, which is saying a lot. This doesn’t mean, however, that Preminger had lost his ability find interesting material. Quite to the contrary, the director’s last feature film, The Human Factor, is an intelligent and restrained spy thriller adapted from a book by one of the genre’s grand masters, Graham Greene. Had a filmmaker with more passion tackled the project, The Human Factor could have achieved a much greater impact. As is, it’s respectable but unimpressive.

          Set in England, the story concerns two MI6 analysts, Marcus Castle (Nicol Williamson) and Arthur Davis (Derek Jacobi). Castle has settled into a quiet existence with his wife, Sarah (Iman), a former spy whom he met while working for the UK in South Africa, and her son. Conversely, Davis hates the dull routine of a desk job, preferring the high life of nightclubs and women. When clues from within the USSR alert ambitious security officer Colonel Daintry (Richard Attenborough) to a leak in MI6’s African division, Daintry collaborates with a ruthless superior officer, Dr. Percival (Robert Morley), on an investigation into the activities of Castle and Davis. Describing any more of the story would reveal key plot twists, but suffice to say that Greene’s narrative plays provocative games with duplicity, personal agendas, and political affiliations, as well as the X factors of bloodlust and careerism.

          In fact, nearly everything about The Human Factor works except for Preminger’s direction. Tom Stoppard’s script is intelligent, if a bit mechanical, and the cast is excellent, with the exception of model-turned-actress Iman, who’s quite weak in this, her debut performance. Williamson defines a believable sort of middle-class discomfort, which is surprising to encounter in this context; Jacobi essays a would-be swinger whose style outpaces his substance; and Attenborough is terrific as a company man who maintains rigid control until he realizes the dangerous repercussion of his brazen maneuvers. Morley’s performance is a bit odd, for while he delivers lines with his usual panache, he often seems as if he’s reading dialogue from cue cards, and the lengthy sequence of Morley making exaggerated facial expressions while reacting to a topless dancer is unpleasant to watch. The stripper scene is one of many that Preminger both films unimaginatively and lets run to excessive length; these shapeless stretches dilute the story’s potential impact.

          The Human Factor eventually comes together in a credibly unresolved sort of way, since everyone involved in the story becomes affected by revelations and suspicions. Nonetheless, the movie isn’t nearly the elegant descent into darkness it should have been.

The Human Factor: FUNKY

Rosebud (1975)

          Following the horrors of the 1972 Munich Olympics, the pro-Palestine terrorist organization Black September was depicted in a number of film projects, some based on real events and some wholly fictional. In addition to this picture, which was extrapolated by producer-director Otto Preminger from a novel by Paul Bonnecarrère and Joan Hemingway, Black September appears in the big-budget thriller Black Sunday (1977). Yet while Black Sunday is a robust action thriller, Rosebud is a talky procedural depicting the complex international response to a politically motivated kidnapping. Like many of Preminger’s movies, Rosebud is simultaneously too smart for its own good—issues are discussed at such great length that the movie sometimes seems like a talk show—and too tidy. Even with the presence of characters who personify the ambiguity of the modern world, Rosebud is dry and schematic. This is exacerbated by Preminger’s predilection for scenes in which characters sit or stand in one position while delivering reams of dialogue.

          Dramaturgical shortcomings aside, Rosebud is somewhat compelling because of its level of detail. The picture begins by introducing a group of young women from various countries as they hop onto the massive yacht Rosebud, which is docked in the Mediterranean and owned by French businessman Charles-Andre Fargeau (Claude Dauphin), who is grandfather to one of the ladies. After Black September operatives hijack the boat and move the women to a hidden location, Fargeau hires Larry Martin (Peter O’Toole), a CIA-trained operative, to engineer the release of the women. Extensive back-and-forth maneuvers ensue. The terrorists use ingenious means to obfuscate their location while issuing films in which the captives read lists of demands. Larry tracks the source of the terrorists’ finances to an Englishman named Edward Sloat (Richard Attenborough), who converted to Islam and became a fanatic. Meanwhile, individuals including an activist sympathetic to the Palestinian cause are used as pawns, by both sides in the conflict, to gain information and leverage.

          Some of the scenes depicting backroom negotiations feel sterile, thanks to drab staging and inconsistent acting, but the script—credited to Preminger’s son, Erik Lee Preminger—is painstaking in the extreme. Even the film’s handful of action scenes, such as the hijacking and the climactic assault on the kidnappers’ lair, include copious details about methodology. Plus, as Preminger did in Exodus (1960) and other politically themed films, the filmmaker paints a complicated picture by showing how crisscrossing agendas create problems—for instance, while the parents of the kidnapped women want to capitulate, government officials from America and Israel advocate hard-line stances toward negotiating with terrorists. So, while Rosebud is infinitely more cerebral than visceral, the story is muscular and relevant.

          As for the performances, O’Toole dominates with his signature brand of civilized cruelty, and Attenborough infuses his small part with to-the-manor-born indignation. Kim Cattrall, in her movie debut, provides streetwise edge playing one of the kidnapped women, and Gallic star Isabelle Huppert lends dignity to the role of a released hostage who participates in the effort to rescue her friends. Other notables in the cast are Cliff Gorman (as an Israeli intelligence officer) and Raf Vallone (as the courtly father of Huppert’s character).

Rosebud: GROOVY

Conduct Unbecoming (1975)

          “Gentlemen do not question the honor of other gentlemen,” the imperious Col. Strang tells a cheeky subordinate at a British military base in colonial India, circa the late 19th century. The colonel’s declaration gets to the heart of Conduct Unbecoming, a solid courtroom drama predicated on the Old World notion that persons of good social standing should be considered beyond reproach. Adapted from a play by Barry England, the story revolves around Lieutenants Drake (Michael York) and Millington (James Faulkner), both of whom are new arrivals at Strang’s base. Drake is a proper soldier who comfortably defers to authority and tradition, whereas Millington is an arrogant dilettante who hopes to conclude his national service as quickly as possible. Upon arrival at the base, the lieutenants are inundated with rules about proper conduct, including the strange instruction to avoid the flirtations advances of Mrs. Scarlett (Susannah York), the widow of a beloved officer. Yet during a party, Millington makes a pass at Mrs. Scarlett, who is subsequently attacked.

          With Millington the obvious suspect, Strang’s junior officers—led by the officious Captain Harper (Stacy Keach)—empanel an unofficial court-martial tribunal, hoping to keep the scandal private. Millington asks Drake to serve as defense counsel, and Drake assembles evidence that might exonerate Millington. Unfortunately, Drake soon discovers that the regiment plans to railroad Millington whether he’s guilty or not, simply for the sake of expediency and propriety. Therefore, the story ends up exploring two equally relevant dramatic questions: Who really attacked Mrs. Scarlett, and what dirty secrets about the regiment will Drake’s investigation reveal?

          Smoothly directed by Michael Anderson (who reteamed with York the following year for the sci-fi classic Logan’s Run), Conduct Unbecoming is unapologetically melodramatic, but the crisp dialogue and skillful acting make the piece quite watchable. (Howard, Keach, and costars Richard Attenborough and Christopher Plummer give especially lusty performances.) On the minus side, the movie’s sound mix is muddy, and the final plot twist is both silly and tawdry. Nonetheless, the central theme of upper-crust people using social position as a shield for depravity has the desired impact, and key technicians (notably cinematographer Robert Huke, editor John Glen, and music composer Stanley Myers) contribute sterling work.

Conduct Unbecoming: GROOVY

Magic (1978)

          After the success of Marathon Man (1976), the whiz-bang thriller that screenwriter William Goldman adapted from his own novel, it was only a matter of time before Goldman was tapped to bring another of his escapist books to the screen. Hence Magic, which employs the disquieting premise of a ventriloquist gone mad. Benefiting from an amazing performance by star Anthony Hopkins, Magic commands attention from start to finish even though some of the plot twists are highly dubious. Lest we forget, few screenwriters are better at generating pure entertainment than Goldman, so the fun factor mostly trumps logic hiccups. Furthermore, director Richard Attenborough—with whom Goldman previously worked on the World War II epic A Bridge Too Far (1977)—wisely lets the material take the lead, rather than submerging it beneath stylistic flourishes. Magic might strike some modern viewers as quaint, since what passed for shock value in a 1978 popcorn movie now seems restrained, and the love story at the center of the picture never quite works. Nonetheless, there’s a great deal here to enjoy.

          Hopkins plays Corky Withers, a gifted magician who lacks stage presence until he adds a gimmick to his act—Fats, a foul-mouthed dummy that functions as Corky’s onstage comedy partner. Fats’ notoriety earns Corky representation from William Morris agent Ben Greene (Burgess Meredith), who arranges for Corky to shoot a TV pilot. When the network insists on a medical exam, however, Corky balks, and Ben rightly worries that Corky is concealing latent mental illness. Corky leaves New York for his boyhood hometown in the Catskills, where he reconnects with Peggy Ann Snow (Ann-Margret), the girl he was too shy to ask out during high school. Now trapped in a loveless marriage to the brutish Duke (Ed Lauter), Peggy reveals she always liked Corky, so they begin an illicit romance. Goldman then builds suspense around the question of whether Fats—who has become a focal point for the demons in Corky’s soul—will intrude on Corky’s happiness. Cue scenes of mayhem and murder.

          While the picture’s character-driven approach is commendable, Goldman and Attenborough fail to calibrate supporting characters correctly. The Corky character works, and so does Ben Greene, but Peggy’s identity wobbles from scene to scene based on what’s convenient for the story, and Duke feels like a one-note contrivance. Plus, nearly half the movie elapses before the really creepy stuff starts. That said, Magic contains several terrific suspense scenes, most of which are driven by Hopkins’ meticulous depiction of Corky’s doomed attempts to keep his rage in check—watching the actor teeter on the brink of homicidal fury is completely absorbing. The movie also has flashes of Goldman’s signature wiseass humor, and Attenborough prudently borrows tricks from the Hitchcock playbook. It should also be mentioned, of course, that the scare-factor potential of a dead-eyed doll with homicidal intentions is fully exploited—the crude and vicious Fats, whose abrasive voice is provided by Hopkins, emerges as a memorable screen villain.

Magic: GROOVY

Young Winston (1972)

          It’s appropriate that the longest sequence in Young Winston takes place during the Boer War, because the movie is a bore. Restrained and respectful in the extreme, this adaptation of a memoir by the revered UK wartime leader Winston Churchill sprawls across 157 lugubrious minutes. Written for the screen and produced by the great Carl Foreman, with Richard Attenborough handling the direction, the film boasts impressive production values but an overly sterile narrative style.
          The most interesting thread of the movie relates to future politician Winston's fraught relationship with his father, forceful Member of Parliament Lord Randolph Churchill (Robert Shaw). During childhood, Winston struggles to earn his aloof father's attention, and during adulthood, Winston seeks revenge against the political establishment that bested his father. This is rich stuff, but Foreman and Attenborough approach the intense family material with the stuffiness of textbook authors. Another thread of the picture involves Winston's relationship with his American-born mother, Lady Churchill (Anne Bancroft). She represents an interesting collision between aggressive and passive impulses, but her complexities remain largely unexplored. The third and final major thread of the story—which gets the most screen time--involves Winston's military career. Alas, the filmmakers can't decide where they stand on Winston's conduct as an officer. Is he a hero willing to risk all for his country and himself (two entities he considers inextricably linked), or is he the glory-hound his detractors criticize him for being? Like so many questions that are raised by Young Winston, this one goes unanswered.

          Foreman integrated many of Churchill's own musings into the script, and those remarks are read in voiceover by star Simon Ward, performing a cartoonish impression of the real Churchill's distinctive speech pattern. Attenborough, who later found his groove as a director of critic-proof dramas about saintly characters—notably Gandhi (1982)—delivers acceptable work during the picture's big-canvas scenes, such as those depicting Winston's battlefield exploits circa the late 19th century and early 20th century. (It helps that the filmmaker shamelessly copies David Lean’s pictorial techniques.) Attenborough's filmmaking doesn't fare as well during close-quarters sequences. For instance, he relies on an ineffective device of filming just one side of long interview scenes while an unseen journalist peppers the interview subject with questions. These scenes drag on forever.

          Not all of Young Winston’s shortcomings should be blamed on Attenborough, however. Leading man Ward (who plays Winston as a young adult) lacks charisma and dynamism, which short-circuits the whole enterprise, and Foreman’s script features excruciating detail about the internecine processes of British government. (Even the long Boer War sequence, which portrays Winston's capture by enemy forces and subsequent daring escape, gets bogged down with narration explaining the political significance of Winston’s situation.) Unsurprisingly, Shaw gives the closest thing the picture has to a full-blooded performance. His appearance climaxes with a poignant scene of Lord Churchill succumbing to mental decay in the midst of a speech. But if the best scene in a two-and-a-half-hour biopic doesn't revolve around the protagonist, that’s a problem.

Young Winston: FUNKY

A Bridge Too Far (1977)

          Go figure that a movie about a military operation that was thwarted by excessive ambition would itself be thwarted by excessive ambition. Based on the doomed World War II campaign code-named Operation Market Garden, which was staged in late 1944 by Allied forces eager to maximize the gains of D-Day by ending the European component of the war with a push across Holland into Germany, A Bridge Too Far features one of the most impressive all-star casts of the ’70s, in addition to spectacular production values and a few powerful depictions of heroism and tragedy. Furthermore, the movie deserves ample praise for bucking war-movie convention by dramatizing a campaign that didn’t work. And, indeed, the theme evoked by the poetic title—sometimes, just one X factor stands between glory and ignominy—comes across in several key performances. Yet occasional glimpses of effective storytelling do not equal a completely satisfying movie, and A Bridge Too Far fails on many important levels when analyzed in its entirety.

          The movie is hard to follow, because it tracks too many characters in too many locations, and because, quite frankly, director Richard Attenborough fails to give greater dramatic weight to crucial moments. Everything in A Bridge Too Far is presented with almost exactly the same measure of gravitas, so Attenborough squanders interesting potentialities found throughout the movie’s script, which was penned by two-time Oscar winner William Goldman. Clearly, Attenborough and Goldman were both stymied, to a degree, by the sheer scale of the undertaking; producer Joseph E. Levine made it plain he wanted this movie to equal the 1962 epic The Longest Day, another all-star war picture based on a book by Cornelius Ryan.

          Yet while The Longest Day had the advantages of a triumphant subject (D-Day) and a receptive audience (moviegoers still embraced pro-military themes in the early ’60s), A Bridge Too Far is a far different creature—a story of battlefield hubris made at a time when America was still reeling from the traumas of the Vietnam War. So, even if the movie possessed a clearer narrative, chances are it still would’ve been the wrong movie at the wrong time.

          Having said all that, A Bridge Too Far has many noteworthy elements. The subject matter is fascinating, since Ryan’s book itemized the innumerable strategic errors made by the Allies in planning Operation Market Garden—beyond problems of scale, since the campaign involved things like an air drop of 35,000 paratroopers, the plan was so contingent upon component elements that if any one piece of the plan failed, the whole campaign would collapse. Therefore, the movie is a study of men who represent the margin of error that Operation Market Garden cannot afford—whether they’re Americans, Brits, or Poles, the soldiers in this movie try to achieve the impossible even when it’s plainly evident success is beyond their grasp.

          The most vivid moments involve Sean Connery and Anthony Hopkins as British officers trying to hold the Dutch town of Arnhem for days on end despite a crippling lack of reinforcements and supplies. Robert Redford dominates a key sequence in the third and final hour of the movie, playing an American officer who leads a seemingly suicidal charge across a heavily fortified river in broad daylight. Maximilian Schell makes an elegant impression as a German commander capable of mercy and ruthlessness, while Dirk Bogarde is appropriately infuriating as Schell’s opposite number on the Allied side, a British general who refuses to acknowledge the possibility of failure.

          Unfortunately, many promising characterizations are merely sketches: Actors Michael Caine, Edward Fox, Elliot Gould, Gene Hackman, Hardy Kruger, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O’Neal, and Liv Ullmann each have colorful moments, but all are badly underutilized. And as for James Caan, his entire showy sequence could have been deleted without affecting the story, since his subplot feels like a leftover from a World War II movie actually made during World War II. Ironically, though, his are among the film’s most memorable scenes.

A Bridge Too Far: FUNKY

10 Rillington Place (1971)

          Since Richard Attenborough is best known to American audiences for directing Gandhi (1982), and for portraying the grandfatherly developer in Jurassic Park (1993), it’s a shock to see him playing a psycho in 10 Rillington Place, a methodical crime drama about a killer whose crime spree scandalized postwar England. Yet Attenborough commits wholeheartedly to the role of John Christie, a working-class nobody who manages a grimy apartment building and habitually slaughters young female tenants, burying the bodies in a small garden adjoining his building.
          Directed by versatile but unstylish helmer Richard Fleischer, 10 Rillington Place matches several strong performances with persuasive physical details, creating a strong sense of everyday danger. The main focus is Christie’s relationship with his upstairs lodgers, struggling young couple Timothy John Evans (John Hurt) and Beryl Evans (Judy Geeson). Timothy is a simple man, illiterate and prone to angry outbursts, while Beryl is an unhappy housewife who knows she deserves more. When the couple becomes pregnant, they agree to an abortion but can’t afford to have the procedure done in a hospital. Their kindly downstairs neighbor Mr. Christie offers to help, claiming that he picked up medical knowhow during military service.
          The considerable tension in 10 Rillington Place stems from the ease with which Christie contrives means of disguising his murders as accidents; furthermore, the movie takes on a more insidious layer of intrigue once Christie frames an innocent man for his crimes. 10 Rillington Place eventually transforms from a murder story to a legal thriller, and the tissue holding the picture together is Attenborough’s chilling performance as a sociopath determined to get away with murder. His work is complemented by the equally good acting of Geeson and Hurt; Geeson communicates her character’s believable dismay at a dead-end living situation, while Hurt transitions gracefully from the bravado of a man lording over his household to the terror of a naïf trapped by incredible circumstance.
          Ultimately, 10 Rillington Place is as tragic as it is horrific, for while the picture doesn’t have many jump-out-of-your-seat jolts, the methodical way it illustrates Christie’s rampage demonstrates how easily an intelligent monster can hide in plain sight. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics via WarnerArchive.com)

10 Rillington Place: GROOVY

Brannigan (1975)

Killing time between the elegiac Westerns that comprised the final statements of his epic career, John Wayne ambled through this routine thriller about a swaggering American cop set loose on the streets of London, playing the sort of trigger-happy rogue that Clint Eastwood incarnated so much more effectively during the same period in his Dirty Harry flicks. Cast properly, the movie could have boasted a terrific culture-clash tension, but with Wayne in the role, the main character doesn’t make much sense: The actor is far too old to play a dangerous man of action, and his flirtatious interplay with an attractive British copper (Judy Geeson) has a dirty-old-uncle quality, even though the film addresses their age difference. A bigger problem is that despite lots of talk about how reckless Lieutenant Jim Brannigan is, everything he does in the picture is fairly reasonable—he wrecks a good deal of public property, but it’s all in the service of getting killers off the streets. As a result, the idea that Scotland Yard is incensed by his activities never rings true, and the film makes “bobbies” look like boobs, which fits Brannigan into Wayne’s jingoistic filmography but doesn’t do much for the film’s credibility. While the movie drags throughout its laborious 111-minute running time, the underlying premise of Brannigan chasing a U.S. crook who’s hiding out in Europe is solid. Less sturdy is the subplot about an assassin hired to take out Brannigan, because the allegedly frightening killer makes a number of absurdly amateurish attempts on the hero’s life. Instead of rigging elaborate booby traps, why not just shoot the son of a bitch? Costar Richard Attenborough is drab as Wayne’s U.K. counterpart, who does little except get flustered by Brannigan’s bravado, and John Vernon isn’t given nearly enough screen time as the slimy American gangster Brannigan is trying to capture. By the time the film lurches into a ridiculously protracted showdown between Brannigan and the hapless assassin, logic and momentum have been completely trumped by sloppy direction and by Wayne’s enervated grandstanding.

Brannigan: LAME