Honorable Mention
[Spoilers ahead]
This is a film which flirts with greatness.
It came so close, but in the end…well, as frightening as its story may be, as good as the writing is, as impressive as the performances are, it still misses the mark.
Not because of any technical issues, or the performances, but because of something far more important.
But we will get back to that in a moment.
The film is in the sort of glorious black and white that Hollywood used to use back in the Sixties for their serious films, like The Manchurian Candidate or Twelve Angry Men. I’ll confess that I miss it: it looks great and gives the film real weight. But we’ve got a public now that thinks they are being shortchanged if they are forced to watch a film that isn’t bathed in garish hues.
Sad, really.
But it starts out with a very different look, still black and white but somewhat solarized, like clips from a film made in the thirties. There’s a huge crowd, a bull fight, and a frightened man watching as the bull is killed by the matador. This is a nightmare that General Black (Dan O’Herlihy) has been having every night.
And he dreads that someday soon, he will see the face of the matador.
General Black has been under a lot of pressure from his job as he has to deal with the threat of nuclear war. He questions our strategy and where it may lead, but no one is listening to him.
Instead, everyone is certain that our system is perfect. Nothing can possibly go wrong. And the new Fail Safe system is virtually fool proof.
Unless several things just happen to go wrong at the same time.
But one day, during a routine patrol, a group of bombers accidentally receive the order to attack, only to have their radios jammed. They immediately set off towards Moscow to bomb the city…
The film moves from one location to another — a conference in Washington D.C., the President of the United States nearly alone in his command bunker, the pilots flying out of Anchorage on a routine flight, General Black’s family in New York City, and a Strategic Air Command Base in the Midwest. There are a lot of characters, several main plot threads, and quite a few locations, all tied together without any visible difficulty. It’s hard to make a story like this work, hard to keep it all flowing effortlessly and in sync, and yet the Director, Sidney Lumet, makes it look easy.
This is all tied together by consistently good performances. O’Herlihy is one of those vastly underrated actors who had a long career of supporting roles, although I’ll confess I remember him best as Alex Rogan’s alien RIO [Radio Intercept Officer] Grig in The Last Starfighter. This time around, he has a very demanding role which would have been the starring role in a smaller film.
He’s backed up by Henry Fonda as the President, in what proves to be a surprisingly meaty role; and by Walter Matthau as Dr. Groeteschele, a smug and attention loving Political Scientist, who theorizes about how we can win an all-out nuclear war. And it is nice to see a very young Larry Hagman and Dom DeLuise in small roles.
I’ll concede that Fail Safe is on the borderline of what this site covers. As I’ve noted before, many of the film critics writing about Science Fiction back in the Seventies included the High-Tech thriller as one of its subgenres, a category which included a lot of big mainstream films. The computerized Fail Safe system itself was more or less futuristic at times, even if it was only a mild leap forward from what was possible, and the Vindicator bombers have unusual next level capabilities (like the Sixth bomber which is apparently flying a whole fleet of decoy drones, although these are never shown as anything other than blips on the radar). However, the Vindicators are stock footage of the short-lived, supersonic B-58 Hustler.
For some strange reason or other, though, they show all the aircraft stock footage in negative. There is no modelwork, and at times we see aircraft switch types from one shot to the next.
To be fair, this is a lot rarer than it is in some low budget films.
However, I’m not sure whether that excuse flies when we are talking an expensive, high profile film.
It isn’t that hard, guys!
I should also note that the film does a brilliant job of building up the suspense, as the bombers penetrate deeper and deeper into Soviet airspace and the efforts to stop them become more desperate.
The story actually came from the best seller novel of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler and it does a great job of portraying the routine horror of living at a time when nuclear war could break out at any minute. But this is where the problems start coming in.
Now I more or less buy Walter Matthau’s character, as an intellectual who is a bit disconnected from reality, who sees the prospect of nuclear war as a mere fact and plays all sorts of mental games with how to win that war.
But it gets harder to believe when soldiers faced with potential nuclear war are so unwilling to work with the Soviets that they have violent breakdowns, refuse to cooperate or even mutiny — or when the pilot of the final bomber refuses to listen to his own wife, and decides to die along with his target. Surely anyone in that position would be happy to find a way out, regardless of his instructions.
This is particularly true of the vastly immoral devil’s bargain at the end of the film, where General Black — who has been portrayed as a thoughtful and morally concerned individual throughout — is sent to carry out a horrific attack which threatens the lives of his own family. Now I find it hard to believe that, if you were going to send someone to bomb an American City that you would pick someone who had family there — or that you would pick an intelligent and thoughtful man and not someone with a reputation for following any order no matter how bad. Although it seems almost unimaginable that anyone, no matter how blindly they had obeyed before, could follow those orders, even if failing to do so could result in the deaths of countless millions more people.
Which means, strangely enough, whether anyone involved realized it or not, Fail Safe sides with Dr. Groeteschele in his belief in killing millions to save the lives of hundreds of millions.
Which is particularly uncomfortable when you remember that he is a bit of a straw man, someone whose theories are set up so that they can be knocked down — and, in this fictionalized world, one of the reasons we have reached the point where we might need such a drastic action.
Right.
In fact, far too many of the characters are straw men, and the film has little nuance. I’m not sure whether the original novel is to blame, or whether it is Walter Bernstein’s script. Either way, the actions of many of the characters are very hard to understand, let alone believe.
Or, in other words, we have yet another example of a film which is really about one big idea, and everything else is there just to push that idea, whether it fits with the rest or not. While it tries to build up its characters a bit before the main action starts, we really do not get any insight into what drives Colonel Cascio into mutiny while our only glimpses of the pilot before takeoff are of a soldier unhappy with the way things are being run and give us no clues to his later fanaticism.
Unless the film wants to tell us that we are all capable of doing such things.
I don’t know. If that’s the case you have to wonder why they made the film in the first place.
It just doesn’t work. None of it rings true.
Which is a shame when the rest of the film is so well done…
rivets on the poster 