Gray Greene

By R.S.

THE HUMAN FACTOR Directed by Otto Preminger Screenplay by Tom Stoppard

This is at least a faithful adaptation.

Perhaps deliberately underemploying his gift for mercurial language, Playwright Tom Stoppard has delivered a careful script based on Graham Greene's fine novel about a man forced to choose be tween betraying his love and betraying his country. The work is translated to the screen with scene-for-scene, almost line-for-line fidelity to the original. In the central role of a bureaucrat in the English espionage apparatus, whose debt to the Communists for helping to spirit his black, politically active wife (affectlessly played by the model Iman) out of South Africa finally rises to insupportable heights, Nicol Williamson gives a strong, subtly controlled performance. There is some nice work, too, by a supporting cast made up largely of distinguished British actors (John Gielgud, Robert Morley and, most notably, Richard Attenborough as an insecure security officer, masking soft ness with a hearty manner).

It is Director Preminger who lets down the side. Perhaps because his film was hobbled by money problems, he sets up too many scenes in awkwardly ar ranged groupings and then just lets them run on without a single change of angle. The lighting is harsh, flat and so hasty that ugly shadows frequently play distractingly against the sets. As a result, the film has about it a sad weariness that far exceeds the requirements of the novelist's characteristic tone. The once too flamboyant Preminger has diminished rather than heightened not only the suspense but what was the intense, agonizing human drama of The Human Factor.

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