Westworld (1973)

Michael Crichton's directorial debut, adapted from his own novel, is the film that established his career-long fascination — one he'd return to twenty years later with Jurassic Park — with theme parks whose technology outpaces the humans running it. Westworld works the same basic machine both times: a playground built on cutting-edge automation, a wealthy guest paying for a curated illusion of danger, and a systems failure that turns curated danger into the real thing.

Yul Brynner's Gunslinger is the film's most enduring creation: an android built to lose every quick-draw duel against paying guests, whose black hat, silver eyes and expressionless, robotic pursuit once it stops following its programming feels genuinely unstoppable — a direct ancestor of the Terminator over a decade before Cameron's film, and reportedly a specific influence on it. Brynner plays the role with total physical stillness, letting the character's implacability do all the work a more expressive performance would have undercut.

Crichton's low-budget, workmanlike direction doesn't have the visual polish of his later work, but the film's central anxiety — automated systems designed for a guest's controlled illusion of risk, malfunctioning into genuine danger nobody built an off-switch for — proved durable enough to spawn a sequel, a short-lived 1980 TV series, and a much larger and more philosophically ambitious HBO series decades later, all still working the same fundamental premise.