Fail Safe

Fail Safe (Sidney Lumet – 1964) was eclipsed by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, a film released almost simultaneously with this doomsday thriller. Strangelove is a masterpiece; Fail Safe is merely very good. Both movies share the same essential plot: American aircraft carrying nuclear bombs are scrambled by a mysterious threat. The threat turns out to be non-existent. But one of the bomber planes (in Fail Safe’s case, a squadron of six jets) can’t be recalled. The pilots think that nuclear Armageddon is underway and fly into Russian airspace to drop their bombs. In both movies, the Presidents and the joint chiefs of staff are convened and there are tense exchanges with the Russian premier. Both films feature a mad scientist character; Peter Sellers plays Strangelove in Kubrick’s picture; in Fail Safe, Walter Matthau seems miscast as a war-mongering think-tank professor – someone on the order of Herman Kahn. Both films have ridiculously dire climaxes. Kubrick realized that the sheer horror of the subject required comedy; Lumet, adapting a popular best seller of the day, goes for horror straight and unadorned. The film is shot in nightmare black and white, characters buried in deep shadow or garishly exposed by glaring light. Everything is claustrophobic, subterranean, confined. Even the aerial scenes seem static, dream-images shot in some kind of solarized grey. There is no soundtrack other than hisses, clicks, and metallic whines supplementing the hysteria of the dialogue. (We hear a phone make a high-pitched whine as it melts in a nuclear blast and the closing titles are shown with a variant of that hideous sound buzzing on the soundtrack.) The opening ten minutes of Lumet’s film looks like Godard – there are brutalist intertitles, images that don’t make sense, and, then, a long, and increasingly weird scene, involving Matthau’s character and a nymphomaniac that looks surprisingly like Jackie Kennedy. The picture shares many characteristics, in style and form with Godard’s Alphaville or Masculin-Feminin. The movie is exceptionally effective but drably earnest – Kubrick’s picture so occupies this subject that we keep remembering images from that film; it undercuts the movie even today – and I’m sure that the picture was completely eclipsed in 1964. When Henry Fonda, as the Lincolnesque-President, negotiates with the Russian Premier – Fonda offers to nuke New York as an apology for America’s accidental destruction of Moscow – you can’t help thinking about how Kubrick might have staged that conversation, probably Peter Sellers on both ends of the phone line and the President saying – “I can’t give you New York, Vladimir, but how about Akron or, maybe, Atlanta – what about Atlanta?”