The dark twin of Dr Strangelove, Fail Safe came out the same year as Kubrick’s film and was sued by him over copyright infringement. There wasn’t any, but for a quiet life Kubrick’s studio, Columbia, played along and released his film first in January, then Sidney Lumet’s film later in the year.
Both films are reactions to the Cuban Missile Crisis two years before, a point in history when events seemed to gain a traction all of their own and humans seemed powerless to prevent what looked like a slide towards nuclear war between the USA and USSR.
Both Strangelove and Fail Safe ask the question: what if humans really hadn’t been able to intervene, if the logic of systems, computers and protocols simply couldn’t have been interfered with once it had been set running? Could nuclear armageddon caused by the supposedly preventative strategy of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) follow?
The paranoid arc of both films’ stories is broadly similar – a failure at some level (a mad army general in Strangelove, a computer malfunction here). The big difference is that Strangelove is a satire whereas Fail Safe is not, the title excepted, with its massively ironic use of the word “Safe”.
Director Sidney Lumet does it all deadly straight, with datelines and countdowns and black and white imagery even starker than Kubrick’s. There’s no music to distract, just a war room where generals convene and an isolated bunker beneath the White House where Henry Fonda’s anxious US President and Larry Hagman’s trusty translator, Buck, try to persuade the Soviet Premier not to retaliate when the group of US bombers heading their way eventually drop 20-megaton nuclear bombs on Moscow.
Even though an accident has sent the bombers towards the Russian capital, the planes cannot be recalled, though how everyone tries. This includes the President talking to the lead pilot over the radio (the president is obviously an impostor, the pilot reasons, and this is just the sort of trick you’d expect from the Commies), and getting the pilot’s distraught wife to plead on the world’s behalf for him to abort his mission.
In the end the President comes up with a tit for tat formula that is simple and shocking (and which I won’t reveal).
Much of the film is focused on an uber-hawkish political scientist called Dr Groeteschele, who urges the generals to strike first and strike hardest, to take advantage of a situation fate has handily thrown their way. Groeteschele – Grotesque? He’s the Dr Strangelove equivalent we meet first of all at a party where he’s hammering out his hardline anti-communist views and wondering aloud how long it would take to rebuild civilisation in the wake of a massive nuclear conflagration. It is Strangelove’s “mine shaft” speech (where he advocates 20 women for every man to help rapidly restore population numbers) done without humour.
There are humanising elements. The character of General Black (Dan O’Herlihy), who’s been wondering all along when the computers are going to exceed humanity’s ability to control them. And Lumet’s direction, which uses 12 Angry Men close-ups on sweating faces at key moments of high emotion. But in general this is a pitilessly procedural film, with the machine logic of the situation matched by the ratchet-like deployment of a very dark irony. In the end, as game theory is brought into play, the enemies find common cause, humanity even, at the moment when they are on the point of annihilating each other.
Because he started out in the derided TV, Lumet remained an under-rated director right to the end of a very long career that ranged from The Pawnbroker and Network to Running On Empty and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. He’s superb here. His little montage of New York life done in snapshots at the end, they way sound is manipulated throughout with everyone under-miked to point up the fragility of their voices. His conjuring of tension right from the start and the way he can maintain and build on it to the last moment.
Against it, a bland assumption that the US, even though it’s clearly the aggressor – accidental or not – has the moral upper hand, represented by Fonda, who of course makes a very decent sort of US President, making a speech to the Soviet Premier on human culpability, a homily from a god-fearing man to a godless one.
The film didn’t do well. Audiences who’d seen Strangelove earlier in the year expected more comedy. Fail Safe is dark meat. If you are going to watch them in tandem as a double bill, make sure to watch this one first.
Fail Safe – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
