In 1975, George Kennedy starred in an unusual revenge thriller in which AI was used to catch the bad guys. A look back at The ‘Human’ Factor:
Revenge films and vigilantes were all over the place in the 1970s, whether it was Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey gunning down crooks in Death Wish (1974) or Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle going on a rampage in Taxi Driver (1976). One of the more unusual thrillers of its type from the era, though, was The ‘Human’ Factor from 1975. For one thing, there’s its high-tech premise, in which George Kennedy’s protagonist uses cutting-edge technology to track down his enemies.
Kennedy plays John Kinsdale, a middle-aged, American computer expert stationed in Naples. Each day, he says goodbye to his picture-perfect Nuclear family – wife, two sons, a daughter with an outsized clown doll – and drives to his workplace at a nearby NATO base. There, behind layers of security and in brutalist interiors, Kinsdale and his colleagues Mike (John Mills) and Janice (Rita Tushingham) work on advanced computer systems used to help North America and its allies fight the Cold War.
Then a group of scruffy terrorists murder Kinsdale’s entire family, and Kinsdale – quite understandably – resolves to hunt them down. Unlike the protagonists in most revenge films, however (see 1977’s Rolling Thunder) Kinsdale doesn’t rely solely on guns and fists. Heading back to his office, he uses all the hardware at his disposal to find the culprits; he uses a computer program, for example, to deduce that the specific chemicals in a lock of hair found at the crime scene means that one of them must have flown in from New York.
With the help of his pipe-smoking sidekick Mike, Kinsdale uses the military’s computers to glean other information from government databases. They also use their systems’ “event probability mode” to algorithmically predict where the terrorists might strike next. It’s unusually advanced stuff for a film from 1975; if advanced supercomputers appeared at all in the films of the decade, it was usually in sci-fi thrillers like Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) or Demon Seed (1977).
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The almost matter-of-fact use of computers in The ‘Human’ Factor (no, the quote marks aren’t a typo) feels more akin to the sorts of movies that became commonplace after the home computer revolution of 1977. By the time movies like WarGames (1983) and Runaway (1984) came out, a larger section of the public had probably owned an Atari 2600 console or at least knew someone who owned, say, a Commodore PET or a ZX Spectrum.
It’s a wonder what mid-70s audiences would have thought about the sequences where Kennedy and his superiors watch military simulations of nuclear conflict (remarkably like those seen in WarGames, in fact) play out on a huge screen. Or John Mills spouting complex-sounding tech speak, some of which even the actor doesn’t appear to understand. There’s even a fascinating sequence in which Kinsdale connects a computer to a telephone to send data to his colleague over at NATO. Sending or receiving data over a phone line was something most average people wouldn’t get to do for at least a decade or more.
Nor is The ‘Human’ Factor some quirky underground thriller made for a few thousand dollars. Its director is Edward Dmytryk, a Hollywood veteran who worked his way up through the studio ranks and made such hits as Crossfire (nominated for Best Picture in 1947), The Caine Mutiny (1954) and The Carpetbaggers (1964). George Kennedy had won awards for his work in Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Airport (1970); John Mills got an Oscar for Ryan’s Daughter (1971). Eminent composer Ennio Morricone (A Fistful Of Dollars, Once Upon A Time In The West), adds a touch of class to the violent proceedings with a characteristically lush piano score.
Kennedy doesn’t merely coast through his performance and collect his pay cheque, either. His horror at the slaughter of his family is quite affecting, and his towering stature makes him similarly convincing when the bloody vengeance unfolds (we won’t dwell too long on his slightly awkward running scenes, though). Unusually, at least some of Kinsdale’s retribution is meted out on people who also work behind the camera; co-writer Thomas Hunter plays a terrorist who finds himself wrapped in a length of chain, while producer (and former rock and roll star) Frank Avianca casts himself as Kamal, the group’s leader. (Wait until you see the sticky end the film has in store for him…)
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From this writer’s (admittedly rushed) research into The ‘Human’ Factor’s box office, it’s a little unclear how well it did financially. Certainly, it was marketed as a natural successor to Death Wish (it’s even namechecked on the novelisation’s front cover), which made the top 10 highest-grossing films of 1974, not far behind The Godfather Part II and Airport 1975 (which starred Kennedy).
The year of The ‘Human’ Factor’s release was dominated by the likes of Jaws, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Dog Day Afternoon; however well (or otherwise) the film did financially, it’s one of those quirky genre items that has faded from view somewhat since. Indeed, this writer hadn’t heard of it until Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary talked about it in one of their lively Video Archives podcasts.
Although self-evidently a product of its time, The ‘Human’ Factor is a fascinating movie – one that both anticipates the tech thrillers that would emerge just a few years later, and stands as a record of filmmaking tastes of its particular year. Its reactionary anger and bracing violence place it slap bang in the middle of a decade of similarly bleak revenge flicks. It also landed, not uncoincidentally, right on the cusp of what was later billed as the First AI Winter. After years of research into the field – and bullish predictions that generalised intelligence, capable of “doing any work a man can do” to quote researcher HA Simon – failed to emerge, and funding in AI began to dwindle in 1974.
At the time of writing this in 2024, we’re in the middle of another AI goldrush, with proponents again arguing that large language models such as ChatGPT are just the start of a new explosion in artificial intelligence. It’s little surprise, then, that we’re now seeing a new wave of thrillers that feature AI in some form.
Last year’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning saw Tom Cruise face a terrifyingly powerful machine bent on destroying humanity (a threat that is still unresolved – its concluding chapter is due out in 2025). Netflix’s Heart Of Stone, also released in 2023, had several parallels with The ‘Human’ Factor – it being about a government agent (Gal Gadot) using a computer system to track down terrorists. That system was so powerful that its algorithms could essentially predict the future.
Because we don’t have access to an all-knowing computer system, we can’t know whether the current AI boom will continue or whether it will be followed by more disillusionment and dwindling investment as we’ve seen in the past. Whatever happens, it’s fascinating to think that George Kennedy and John Mills were using algorithms to catch terrorists almost 50 years ago.
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