Movie Review: Examining 'Fail-Safe'

Pros: Gripping story, excellent performances from cast, great directing from Lumet

Cons: Too stark and depressing for some viewers, dated, claustrophobic at times

Imagine, if you will, that you are Col. Jack Grady, USAF, the commanding officer of a squadron of "Vindicator" bombers on routine patrol somewhere over Alaska. It's the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union still exists, and the Cold War is still being waged. Your plane, along with several others from your squadron, is nearing its Fail-Safe point -- a spot on the map where you will "orbit" for a specific amount of time before either returning to base or, if worse comes to worst, a coded attack signal orders you to head to your target inside Russia.

This is part of your routine as an Air Force pilot, and thus far every time you've gone up on patrol you've reached the Fail-Safe point and returned home without incident.

That is....until today.

Today, your "routine patrol" will be interrupted by the clicking and humming of your sophisticated communications gear as a coded message from Strategic Air Command HQ in Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha reaches your plane. On your instrument panel, a series of letters and numbers appears. You look at your co-pilot. He looks back at you. You pull out the packet of codes for the day and compare the letters and numbers on the instruments to those on a card in your gloved hand...and your eyes widen in horror: you've been ordered to attack Moscow.

Little do you know, isolated in your Vindicator's cockpit and following all the protocols and your training, that a combination of glitches -- a computer component goes bad, and a false alarm over a "UFO" over Canada -- has triggered off an accidental "Go" order to you and your fellow bomber pilots. Your training kicks in, and you, Col. Jack Grady, are unaware that the President of the United States is on the hot line with the Soviet leadership, trying to avert an all-out nuclear war, even going as far as ordering your commanders at SAC to tell the Russians how to shoot you down. You press on, ignoring even the pleas of someone who sounds like your wife, because you have been trained too well and you think it's a Soviet trick. You press on, not knowing that a hard-line theorist named Prof. Groeteschele is advocating an all-out first strike against the Soviets...or that Col. Cascio in Omaha is suffering from a nervous breakdown, or that American fighter pilots are shooting your comrades down in an effort to stave off disaster.

You press on....toward Moscow....

In 1964, at the height (or depths, if you prefer) of the Cold War, moviegoers saw two films that were similarly themed but very different in style and tone -- Stanley Kubrick's darkly satirical Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Sidney Lumet's straightforward Fail-Safe.

Of the two, Dr. Strangelove is perhaps the better known movie, in part because it was released first, but mostly because it featured terrific comic performances from Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Keenan Wynn, and Sterling Hayden (as Gen. Jack D. Ripper, whose fixation on "precious bodily fluids" is the driving force for his "accidental" attack on the Soviet Union). (It should also be noted that Kubrick, when he heard that Fail-Safe was nearing completion, filed a plagiarism suit claiming that Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, authors of the novel on which the screenplay was based, had ripped off Peter George's Red Alert, which was the source for the Kubrick-Terry Southern script for Strangelove. Kubrick lost the case, but the suit tied up Fail-Safe's release until late 1964.)

Although Fail-Safe's story bears a striking resemblance to Dr. Strangelove (a squadron of American bombers patrolling at their fail-safe point suddenly gets a coded message ordering an immediate nuclear attack against their targets in the Soviet Union, with tragic consequences), the cause of this catastrophe isn't a mad Air Force bomber wing commander with bizarre notions about Commies and bodily fluids; rather, it's a combination of a false alarm and a computer malfunction. And although -- like Kubrick's President Muffley -- the President of the United States (Henry Fonda) has to contact the Soviet Premier over the hot line to avert disaster and even orders U.S. fighters to shoot down their colleagues in the B-58s, Fail-Safe is still a very different film, full of tension and horrifying drama.

Fail-Safe is a stark, almost minimalist film that focuses on character and atmosphere more than on action. It is an almost claustrophobic movie because Lumet confines the narrative to three locations -- the Vindicator bomber's cockpit, the sparse White House situation room, and the SAC Operations Center in Omaha -- with only a bit of footage of Air Force planes taken from documentaries and other sources; the Defense Department refused to collaborate with the film producers due to the dark nature of Fail-Safe's storyline.

Still, for all its limitations (and its failure at the box office), the film is gripping, believable, and thought provoking. Lumet gets great performances from his mostly male cast, led by the always effective Henry Fonda as the President of the United States, a man who must make a terrifying Solomonic choice when he realizes that one of the Vindicators may reach its target. Look also for sterling performances by a pre-I Dream of Jeannie Larry Hagman as the President's translator, character actor Dan O'Herlihy as Air Force Brig. Gen. Warren A. Black, Fritz Weaver as the neurotic Col. Cascio, and Walter Matthau as the Strangelovian political scientist/nuclear strategist Prof. Groeteschele. Matthau fans accustomed to his comedic roles in such fare as The Bad News Bears and the Grumpy Old Men duology will be stunned by how disagreeable his character is in Fail-Safe.

Cast List
Dan O'Herlihy ... Brig. Gen. Warren A. Black
Walter Matthau ... Prof. Groeteschele
Frank Overton ... Gen. Bogan
Ed Binns ... Col. Jack Grady
Fritz Weaver ... Col. Cascio
Henry Fonda ... The President
Larry Hagman ... Buck
William Hansen ... Defense Secretary Swenson
Russell Hardie ... Gen. Stark
Russell Collins ... Gordon Knapp
Sorrell Booke ... Congressman Raskob
Nancy Berg ... Ilsa Wolfe
John Connell ... Radioman Thomas
Frank Simpson ... Sullivan (crew)
Hildy Parks ... Betty Black
Janet Ward ... Helen Grady
Dom DeLuise ... TSgt. Collins
Dana Elcar ... Mr. Foster
Stewart Germain ... Lou Cascio
Louise Larabee ... Mrs. Cascio
Frieda Altman ... Jennie Johnson
Charles Tyner ... Jet fighter pilot