The Human Factor (1979)

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Nicol Williamson is pretty perfect as a timid low-level intelligence operative in The Human Factor, a spy thriller grounded in the realism of low stakes. He's a desk jockey with a wife and a kid, and just about the last person you expect to be a double-agent. Maybe the leak is coming from his office partner played by Derek Jacobi? Maybe he's being played by one of the higher-ups like Richard Attenborough's initially slimy internal security man, or Robert Morley's ruthless doctor. Or could it be his South African wife, played by Iman, whose difficulty with representing emotion might just create a more ambiguous performance, I don't know. All will be revealed, and there's good paranoid feel to the picture, except somewhere in the middle when we're forced into an extended flashback of Williamson's time in South Africa, which slows the picture down to a crawl and shows us things we already knew or inferred from the contemporary context and action. Nevertheless, it's the kind of Cold War story we hardly ever see, looking at the smaller cogs in the intelligence machine, as cinema is more often interested in high stakes or fanciful action. 3 years 11 months ago