Fail Safe (1964)

[Agalia Valcin]

Ihave lauded the work of Sidney Lumet several times on this blog because he is one of my all-time favorite directors. Lumet was a purveyor of truth whose work is as memorable and thought provoking as that of any director I can think of. Today I comment on one of his most underrated films, which happens to be one of the greatest thrillers of all time. From 1964 and likely to give you nightmares, Lumet tackles nuclear annihilation in Fail-Safe, screenplay by Walter Bernstein, from the book by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler.

We are at Strategic Air Command headquarters at the Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska at the height of the Cold War. An unidentified aircraft has passed into American airspace and an intruder alert is issued in response. Soon after, the aircraft is identified as a civilian plane and the alert is cancelled, but a computer overrides the cancellation and sends orders to an American bomber unit to attack Moscow.

The seemingly simple scenario I just described is the premise of Fail-Safe, the title of which refers to the point of no return, in a sense. Much of the tension in the movie comes from the fact that when the pilots of the bombers are given the fail safe order they can no longer accept voice commands, which means all attempts to stop their trajectory toward Moscow are futile. The scenes are extraordinarily moving as these men know they are flying their final missions. Equal in intensity are the scenes on the ground in various locations like the Pentagon and Air Force headquarters where the people who advise and/or make the decisions either rise or fall with the pressure of knowing they must kill Americans to avoid an all out war. Tension builds as the bombers reach the Russian border and advance from there. Then there is the President, played by Henry Fonda, the man who has to make the ultimate decision to save the world after trying his best at diplomacy. How does one apologize for bombers though? How can such an error be corrected? How does one make up for the annihilation of a city?

Fail-Safe is a movie I never want to watch, but I can never turn away from its engrossingly told drama. Your praise of the ensemble, and of Fonda in particular, is so true. He has always been a favourite, but as the years go by he is more and more the favourite.

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In 1964, Stanley Kubrick through Columbia Pictures released his outrageously funny Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb to universal acclaim. Several months later, Columbia would release Sidney Lumet's take on nuclear proliferation and accidental nuclear war in Fail-Safe. Lumet's film was a box-office disaster. After audiences laughed so hard at Peter Sellers and company in Dr. Strangelove, no one was in the mood for a serious take on the matter. That attitude still persists as Fail-Safe is unfairly compared to Strangelove in almost all respects. Such treatment is unfair as Fail-Safe continues to be deeply unsettling, highly claustrophobic, and contains filmmaking that is terrifying to witness.

Sidney Lumet, seven years following his stupendous film directorial debut in 12 Angry Men, began a fertile thirteen-year period of hit followed by hit with Fail-Safe (and ending with 1976's Network). With Fail-Safe, Lumet crafted the most realistic fiction of a buildup to nuclear catastrophe. While two VIPs are touring Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, a technical failure has resulted in a squad of bombers flying over a "fail-safe" zone over Alaska receiving erroneous orders. Those orders contain the worst case of worst-case scenarios: the pilots are ordered to nuke Moscow. The USAF attempts to establish contact, but there is interference due to a radio jammer being used by the Soviets and by the time the USAF establishes radio contact, the team of bombers is well past the radio silence line.

The large supporting cast includes Dan O'Herlihy, Walter Matthau, Frank Overton, Ed Binns, Sorrell Booke, William Hansen, Hildy Parks, and a one-minute role by Dom DeLuise of all people. Unfortunately, Matthau's performance is slightly distracting because his character is spewing realist IR theory much to my chagrin - and probably most everyone else as realism is too pessimistic and bellicose an IR theory. At the center of the drama - even though they do not dominate the screentime - on the American side are the President of the United States (Henry Fonda, my headcanon says Juror #8 soon became president) and Buck, his interpreter (Larry Hagman). Fonda and Hagman are locked in a drab white room with only a simple table and communications equipment used to talk to the Soviet Chairman. Hagman is confident in this role and his character not only repeats back what the Soviet Chairman, but also notes the inflection and tone of his words at the president's earlier request. Those tiny details make the interplay between the American and Soviet leaders all the more believable and familiar. Henry Fonda, without a doubt one of the greatest actors of all time, delivers an equally assured performance that makes him one of the best actors ever to play an American president - historical or fictional. As Sidney Lumet once wrote about Fonda, he is, "a barometer of truth against which to measure yourself and others". Like his roles as Juror #8, Tom Joad, a young Abraham Lincoln, and Gil Carter, Fonda once again embodies reason and sense. But this time - without spoiling a frightening twist in the plot - every conceivable solution for repair or redress is on the table.

The film is shot in black-and-white, but one will notice the scenes with Fonda and Hagman have a much higher contrast between lights and darks than in the rest of the film. This high contrast will also be found in the bullfighting dream in the film's opening seconds and exterior shots of the bomber planes. There's some rather dynamic camera movement and shots Lumet uses that had largely only appeared in foreign films and independent films up to this point. Not until Once Upon a Time in the West would audiences be witness to such invasive closeups of the exasperated characters in the film. A combination of a close-up of Fonda's eye after a close-up of his lower face while talking on the phone breathes fear in what typically would have been a statically shot film. As audiences had seen in 12 Angry Men and audiences were going to see in Dog Day Afternoon and Network, no other director in cinema could be more effective in films inhabiting enclosed, restricting, and confined spaces. There are just enough close-ups employed at the appropriate times. There are just enough medium and medium-close shots employed at the right times. Thus, the incredible tension is ratcheted up yet another notch.

Another source of tension in the film? No music score was employed whatsoever. For those who have read many of my film write-ups, I often laud worthy scores and add a little bit of analysis if I can. Those folks know I'm a film score diehard and will be shocked to know that I wholly agree with the decision to go without a score. Many of Lumet's best films go without scores. He doesn't need it; his wisdom of framing and the intelligent screenwriters (in this case, Walter Bernstein) he hires are more than capable of producing drama and tension by their own words. And as such in Lumet's tautest films, there are no superfluous scenes, no superfluous frames. There are only two scenes (the first is the bullfighting dream) at the beginning which have nothing to do with the doomsday scenario Fail-Safe presents. After the first five minutes, there are no glimpses of life outside the underground bunkers until - most cruelly - until the final seconds as this geostrategic dilemma evolves into an act of moral reciprocity. One can only imagine the debates about the film's absurd and unthinkable, yet simultaneously understandable, conclusion.

Fail-Safe is an underappreciated Cold War nuclear thriller as those (rightly) hailing Kubrick's subversive and scathing Dr. Strangelove (wrongly) patronize Fail-Safe for not being as subversive. Subversion has never been a guiding light for my views of film - this is not the case for many Kubrick fanboys. Fail-Safe's commentary contains no traces of subversion; that commentary lies within often wordless moments of nuance that Dr. Strangelove and other films commenting on Mutually Assured Destruction all rejected or failed to achieve. Compared to Kubrick's Strangelove, Lumet's Fail-Safe is aesthetically superior and should be a Criterion Collection wet dream. Yet, when trying to attempt to decide which film is better, comparing Strangelove and Fail-Safe to each other is misguided. The former is satire, the latter is paranoia a la a more artistically inclined John Frankenheimer.

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