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Review
FAIL-SAFE
Rating: 
USA. 1964.
Director – Sidney Lumet, Screenplay – Walter Bernstein, Based on the Novel by Eugene Burdick & Harvey Wheeler, Producers – Sidney Lumet & Max E. Youngstein, Photography (b&w) – Gerald Hirschfeld, Special Effects – Storyboard Inc, Art Direction – Albert Brenner. Production Company – Max E. Youngstein-Sidney Lumet Productions.
Cast:
Henry Fonda (The President), Larry Hagman (Buck), Frank Overton (General Bogan), Walter Matthau (Professor Goeteschele), Dan O’Herlihy (General Black), Fritz Weaver (Colonel Casclo), Edward Binns (Colonel Grady), William Hansen (Secretary Swenson), Nancy Berg (Mrs Wolfe)
Plot: A nuclear strike alert on Russia is called when an unidentified flying object is detected over US airspace. This is found to merely be a plane gone off course and the strike is called down. But one bomber squadron cannot be contacted due to Russian radio interference and it proceeds beyond fail-safe limits. The President contacts the Russians who drop the radio interference to allow them to make contact. But the flight commander ignores the communique, believing it to be an enemy tactic. An adviser urges the President to use this as an opportunity to deal with the Communist threat for good, but instead the President gives the Russians the information necessary to shoot the squadron down. However one of the bombers gets through and drops an atomic bomb on Moscow. The President is left with the only option of having to allow the Russians to bomb New York City in return.
Almost all science-fiction to emerge out of the 1950s in one way or another has the spectre of nuclear war and the A-bomb hanging over it – at the very least came informed by the stark tensions of the Cold War. The 1950s masked these fears in allegories of monsters revived by atomic radiation going amok but ultimately being vanquished by the forces of law and order, or else survivalist tales where a white man and a woman would optimistically set forth to repopulate the world anew. But in the 1960s the Cold War intensified. And correspondingly the science-fiction films of the period beginning with On the Beach (1959) developed a stark tension. There came the sense that now all earlier assurances had been shot out – for in 1962 with The Cuban Missile Crisis, the USA suddenly had to confront the possibility that such nuclear war was no longer a looming fear but an imminent possibility. The films of the 1960s dealing with nuclear war, which include On the Beach, Fail-Safe, Stanley Kubrick’s classic Dr Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and the pseudo-documentary The War Game (1965) now all translate this fear from the level of allegory to that of bleak realism.
In Fail-Safe, director Sidney Lumet creates an incredibly stark tension, evoking a real sense of what it must have really been like during the Cuban Missile Crisis with the seconds ticking away in dread as the sweat drips on character’s foreheads. Lumet stages the film in terms of a series of dramatic peaks – each scene begins on a faint hope, tensions build to frightening confrontations and then each is crushed with nightmarish succession. Like Dr Strangelove, the film confines itself to only three sets. Lumet creates an enormous degree of tension out of a bare minimalism – the most starkly effective scenes occur in the Presidential conference room, which Lumet strips to a single stage consisting of two men, a bare room, a table and a telephone.
Many similarities can be drawn between Fail-Safe and Dr Strangelove. When Stanley Kubrick made Dr Strangelove, he decided that Peter George’s novel Red Alert (1958) couldn’t be filmed straight, that the reality of nuclear war was so grim the only way to perceive it was as a black comedy. As some have snidely observed, the material here might have made for an even blacker comedy than Dr Strangelove. Many have jumped on the seemingly absurd ending where President Henry Fonda orders New York City to be nuked in order to demonstrate to the Russians that the bombing of Moscow was an accident. It is certainly hard to believe that a leader could willingly make such a decision. You can just imagine the ending with The President allowing New York City to be nuked in the hands of Stanley Kubrick and enacted by Peter Sellers’s buffoonish President – the results would have been unwatchably bleak. That said, the ending is one that that Fail-Safe plays with an absolute and shattering dramatic conviction.
The film also offers the end message “The producers of the film wish to stress that it is the stated position of the Department of Defense and the US Air Force that a rigidly enforced system of safeguards and controls ensure that occurrences such as those depicted in the story cannot happen.” This makes Fail-Safe a film that ultimately opts to back away from its nightmare and leaven it with the reassurance that this is only presenting a fiction. Moreover it is one where in inserting this comment, the film sides with assurance in the forces of society, that the US Government is sane and stable and would never allow such to happen. The disturbing thing about the Cold War is that the US Government almost did let it happen – the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dr Strangelove by comparison does not see the need to back away, rather it sees the people in power as quite literally cartoon figures and lunatics, one where the determined realism of the film’s presentation is all the more frightening because one realizes that this is exactly what could happen. Fail-Safe on the other hand raises the starkly real possibility but then runs away from the realism of it and says “it could never happen this way”. Nevertheless Fail-Safe is absolutely compulsive viewing as an historical artifact, revealing just what a level of hair-trigger tension that US-Soviet relations and the very real possibility of nuclear war existed on during the 1960s.
Fail-Safe is also a film that writes speeches. Actors tend to represent polemic points-of-view and deliver boiler face speeches rather than appear as rounded characters. Certainly though you cannot deny that the film marshals an interesting series of debates. And the cast are all excellent to a man, each playing what are one-dimensional roles with complete assurance. Henry Fonda does a brilliant job, reflecting the intensity of decision and continued failures with a wearying weight, and a young Larry Hagman is impressively understated opposite him as the Russian interpreter. Walter Matthau, in stark contrast to the curmudgeonly likeable performances he was typecast in after The Odd Couple (1968), makes for a alarmingly cold and clipped character, arguing in favour of the most xenophobic response with a disturbing plausibility. There’s a rather interesting scene between him and Nancy Berg as a woman he meets at a party who gets turned on by the idea of nuclear war.
Fail-Safe was later remade as a tv movie, the also excellent Fail Safe (2000), directed by Stephen Frears and with Richard Dreyfuss as The President alongside an all-star cast. This was also filmed in black-and-white and had the interesting feature of being broadcast live.
Sidney Lumet is a respected director who has been responsible for a number of classic films such as 12 Angry Men (1957), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962), Serpico (1973), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Network (1976). In genre material, Lumet has also made the Catholic boy’s boarding school psycho-thriller Child’s Play (1972), the all-Black Wizard of Oz musical updating The Wiz (1978) and the whodunnit parody Deathtrap (1982). Last updated: Sunday, 15 February 2009
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