I guess it's pretty common. A while back I watched a live action Saturday morning science fiction show I had watched as a kid in the 1970's. I was shocked. It was directed by Ted Post just a few years after Magnum Force and Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Maybe I held those movies in too high a regard, but I was surprised that a director I'd heard of at all worked on that show. Maybe he was taking it easy for a while, working an easy gig.
In the case of Edward Dmytryk, he went into a long decline. The "Human" Factor was his last feature film, shot in Italy starring George Kennedy.
Kennedy works on a U.S. military base in Italy. He comes home and finds his family has been murdered. He sets out to get the people who did it.
Kennedy plays a computer guy. They don't explain how he knows how to track down terrorists, but movies about people who are trained in that sort of thing, where we're supposed to root for experienced killers, always bothered me. Like James Bond. This movie has one thing in common with The Man with the Golden Gun: George Kennedy drives an AMC Matador and even has a high speed chase through heavy Naples traffic.
One of the villains in the movie is a Palestinian; another is an American anti-war activist. Dmytryk was supposed to be such a liberal. Once McCarthyism ran its course, he should have gone back to being a Communist.
Dmytryk worked as a film professor after this. He authored influential works on film editing and directing.
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