Fail Safe

1964's FAIL SAFE has always somewhat unfairly lived in the shadow of another doomsday thriller of its year, DR. STRANGELOVE.  Stanley Kubrick had in fact persuaded Columbia, who produced both films, to release his first.  Hopefully you are aware, dear reader of the invisible audience, that Kubrick's film was a satire, a very funny take down of Cold War politics and military protocol.  As it turns out, also a more effective treatment of a nightmare scenario, one in which an American bomber heads to the Soviet Union to carry out an erroneous order for a nuclear attack.  Interesting how that happened.  I had seen and absorbed STRANGELOVE many years before I saw FAIL SAFE, and as effective and important as director Sidney Lumet's film is, it seems that dark humor was the better approach.  Or at least the one that resonated harder.

It's a scenario that a disclaimer at film's end assures us could never occur.  FAIL SAFE has a computer glitch go off during routine maintenance, sending the pilots what appears to be a genuine order to drop nukes on Moscow.  As the Soviets utilize jamming of radio communications, Strategic Air Command is unable to reach the bomber to explain the error.  Thus sets off a tense course of action to try anything and everything to prevent the unthinkable. Shoot the bomber down? Sacrifice our boys?  The gallery of players includes Air Force brass at the base in Omaha, advisers in D.C., and the President (Henry Fonda), sequestered in a room with an interpreter (Larry Hagman) as he negotiates over the phone with the Soviet Premier.  The situation grows more dire as, even after the Soviets agree to disable the jamming, the bomber pilots forge ahead, believing that the pleas from back home are phony.   Altered voices to sound like the President, even the pilot's wife.  Our boys are just following the Penatgon playbook.

FAIL SAFE is perfectly designed.  Stark B & W photography by Gerald Hirschfeld.  Ominous use of light and shadow.  Lumet pushes the camera into the actors' faces, all the better for claustrophobia.  His ensemble includes Dan O'Herlihy, Fritz Weaver, Edward Binns, even Sorrell Booke and Dom DeLuise.  Walter Matthau plays Professor Groeteschele, a University egghead who discusses acceptable loss of life in nuclear scenarios at a dinner party, then a few hours later finds himself in one.  His character is drawn as reactionary and cold, a considerable contrast to the President, whose final decision is chilling yet fair. 

I don't rank FAIL SAFE as highly as I would've expected as there are a few melodramatic elements that hurt the picture.  The opening scene with O'Herlihy's character and his wife, where he awakens from a recurring nightmare, is far from auspicious.  Not long after Matthau's character slaps a woman he is driving home. Another misstep.  Perhaps the worst was the moment when Weaver loses his nut and temporarily takes over command in Omaha.  The movie did not need this kind of silliness.  Especially with such a compelling, noose tightening narrative.  Even DR. STRANGELOVE, guilty of some slapstick, did not have such absurdity.