FANTASIA OBSCURA: As If Real Life Didn’t Have Enough Catastrophes Lurking Around the Corner…
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, there’s a lot that can be said in favor of having a good first strike capability…
Fail-Safe (1964)
(Dist.: Columbia Pictures; Dir.: Sidney Lumet)
In 1964, Columbia Pictures released a film that dared to tell a story about some of our greater fears about the modern age, showing audiences the frantic effort to avert a global thermonuclear exchange, where any mistakes could cost millions of human lives.
A few months before, Columbia also released the film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which ensured the former was going to be blown away like model houses at the Nevada Test Site. And like the casualties in both films, this film’s fate came about due to miscalculations and existent tension at a bad time.
The source material for the film came from a serialized novel of that title from Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, which was published in three installments in the Saturday Evening Post in October of 1962, in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. For the most part, the film follows the novel, rounding it out with one or two added characters who are faced with the unthinkable.
On what proves to be very busy day, there is a scramble order given to the nuclear bombers on patrol that are part of Strategic Air Command (SAC), responding to an unidentified radar contact that proves to be a commercial jet off course en route to Toronto. The bombers are allowed to get to their “fail-safe” point, the point beyond which if they get launch codes to attack, they cannot be recalled.
One set of bombers, Group 6, accidentally gets a “go code” at fail-safe from a faulty transmitter, orders they cannot confirm up the chain because the Soviets are using radio jamming on these planes to keep them from receiving any follow-up orders to stand down. With their orders “confirmed,” Group 6 proceeds to their target: Moscow.
The action then proceeds primarily between three sets: We watch the staff at SAC Command at Omaha, NE, where General Bogan (Frank Overton) and Colonel Cascio (Fritz Weaver, in his first major film role) try to recall the planes, ultimately having to work with Soviet air command to insure that the flights do not acquire their targets.
We also get scenes in the Department of Defense conference room, which before the crisis had Secretary Swenson (William Hansen) and General Black (Dan O’Herlihy) are hearing a presentation from a Professor Groeteschle (Walter Mathau) who advocates for planning for a limited nuclear war, and is on hand to provide during the crisis the steady voice of reason opportunism:
Finally, we have the bunker under the White House, where the President of the United States (Henry Fonda) has to both decide on the best course of action to take, while with the help of his Russian translator Buck (Larry Hagman) convincing the Soviet Premiere that the attack is an accident. It’s on his head to take responsibility for the threat to the human race, and it’s up to him to make the ultimate decision as things stop looking like they’re going to get better.
The film plays as a very taut drama, which Lumet tells by emulating French New Wave techniques; there are lots of cuts going to close-ups on faces, with the staccato tone of the dialog providing a beat for the film in lieu of an actual score.
As the stakes get higher and the pressure mounts, we watch different characters reach their breaking points; some do it sooner than others, and some fall apart more completely than their compatriots. In all cases, we see men doing what they can in the face of a grave threat, carrying on as best they can given the circumstances.
Which is also an apt description of Columbia’s executives when Stanley Kubrick got riled.
People who are familiar with Kubrick’s dark, Cold-War comedy reading the synopsis above might think that there are lots of similarities between the two films, which were in production at about the same time (with Dr. Strangelove having gotten out of the gate first). In fact, the author Peter George, who wrote Red Alert, the novel Kubrick based his film on written back in 1958, thought that Burdick and Wheeler’s Fail-Safe copied a lot of plot elements from his book when they serialized their work four years later.
The fact that for Lumet’s film they created the character of Professor Groeteschle, the same way the screenplay from Kubrick and Terry Southern adapting Red Alert created their title character for Peter Sellers to play, made everyone believe that a potentially embarrassing trial on plagiarism charges between two studio properties was looming on the horizon.
A quick out of court sealed settlement was reached between the two sets of producers, which allowed Kubrick enough leverage to really stick it to his rivals. He insisted that his film be released first, in January of 1964 (having already been delayed a few months because of the sour mood in the country brought about by Kennedy’s assassination making a dark comedy seem inappropriate), and that Fail-Safe not get to theaters until October of that year.
Because of the pressure, it became hard to consider the later, more serious picture outside of the fallout from the classic comedy. One could argue that confronted with such horror, given the choice between absurd levity to lighten the load versus unrelenting dread, most audiences would prefer the former, dooming Lumet’s picture to being forgotten as quickly as a nightmare we all want to get over very quickly.
Fonda was quoted in interviews that he could not have played his President straight had he seen Sellers’ character before he filmed Fail-Safe, and many audience members could not think about nuclear war on film without Kubrick’s work coming to mind, flash burned into their memories.
While it was not the cultural touchstone that Dr. Strangelove became, the film survived Kubrick’s first strike to maintain some affection. A critical darling, the film had its proponents during the remainder of the Cold War, and in 2000 CBS broadcast a live adaptation of the work, which had to be done as a period drama due to the nature of the story.
Indeed, soon after Fail-Safe premiered, both the US and USSR were making intercontinental ballistic missiles the mainstay of their nuclear strike forces, making a drama about bomber pilots carrying out a nuclear first strike obsolete only a few years after it premiere.
Mind you, while the means of destruction had changed, the underlying threat remained well afterwards to keep us awake at night.
NEXT TIME: After looking at a film this week where the world’s about to be bombed away, it makes perfect sense next time to look at a film where the survivors, all three of them, rebuild after that calamity.
