✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
United Kingdom · 1979
Rated R · 1h 55m
Director Otto Preminger
Starring Nicol Williamson, Richard Attenborough, Derek Jacobi, John Gielgud
Genre Thriller
Please login to add films to your watchlist.
A low-ranking Secret Service agent is conned into supplying information to Eastern Bloc countries. Although he is not a suspect due to his unimportant position, he realizes he has gotten himself into very deep water when his office partner is hauled in for questioning.
Graham Greene's low-keyed, highly absorbing 1978 novel of an aging English double agent finding himself trapped into defecting to Moscow and leaving his family behind may have seemed like ideal material for Otto Preminger's style of dispassionate ambiguity, but helmer doesn't seem up to the occasion, bringing little atmosphere or feeling to the delicate ticks of the story.
The Associated Press by Bob Thomas
A cerebral approach to espionage and defection, often suspenseful but sometimes dull. [26 Jan 1980]
Graham Greene's impeccably plotted spy story serves Preminger's personal aims with a minimum of modification, as the film develops themes of loneliness, debilitation, and obsessive security—all centered on the tragic survival of moral feeling in a world drained by reason.
Sometimes flat, The Human Factor is nonetheless a lucidly impressive return to form for the 73-year-old director. It's not really a thriller at all, but an understated, uncompromising dissection of an event: an anatomy of the murder of a soul. [11 Feb 1980, p.82]
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
It is a splendidly appropriate project for Otto Preminger, even though he hasn't succeeded at making the most of it.
Washington Post by Gary Arnold
Exquistely written but treacherously threadbare Greene. The author's style doesn't emerge through the filters of Tom Stoppard's foreshortened screenplay and Preminger's monotonous direction, which keeps the exposition at such a low energy level that the scenes feel instantly depleted. [18 Apr 1980, p.E1]
The New York Times by Vincent Canby
A fascinating, slightly chilly picture — as well as one of the best Preminger films in years.
The adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence, and Beethoven.
Vietnam can kill me, but it can’t make me care.
In 1997, the island of Manhattan has been walled off and turned into a giant maximum security prison within which the country's worst criminals are left to form their own anarchic society.
What happens when make-believe believes it's real?
After being banished to Northern France, public servant Phillipe struggles to live in the foreign and unfamiliar town of Bergues.
A faded television actor and his stunt double strive to achieve fame in the final years of Hollywood's Golden Age.
A poor family lies and schemes their way into the employ of a wealthy household — successfully, but with great consequences.