FAIL SAFE (1964)

Entrust machines with too much power and “they take over, they start creating situations”, says Congressman Raskob (Sorrell Booke) in Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe. 60 years later we’re still making films about much the same concern, although recently we’ve been more focused on A.I. than on nuclear command and control systems which the Congressman is worrying about during his tour of Strategic Air Command in Nebraska.

In the intervening period has come a whole sub-sub-genre of films about nuclear strategy, command and control, from Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) and WarGames (1983) to Crimson Tide (1995) and Thirteen Days (2000). Surely the best-known of them, though, is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), and though it is as different a film from Lument’s as you could imagine—satire taken to the point of absurdity, while Fail Safe is a kind of speculative docudrama and completely humourless—the fortunes of the two films were closely intertwined.

Fail Safe (sometimes hyphenated—the producers themselves were inconsistent) was based on a 1962 novel (hyphenated) by the American writers Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, itself in turn based on a short story by Wheeler. Both authors were political scientists by profession (although Burdick had also achieved success as co-author with Bill Lederer of The Ugly American, another work of fiction built around the Cold War), and their novel no doubt owed much of its success to the impression it gave of divulging insider information about the mechanics of US nuclear defence, as well as to its topicality: it was serialised in The Saturday Evening Post around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and reportedly read by President Kennedy.

Based on this, the screenwriter Walter Bernstein—who had only recently been able to work in Hollywood publicly again, after a period placed on the blacklist for his left-wing associations—produced a screenplay which faithfully makes all the same key points as Burdick and Wheeler, reusing many scenes and even bits of dialogue here and there, although occasionally changing the details of who says what and when. Like the novel, it is rich in detail, but its central concern is simple: over-reliance on technology, which theoretically enabled the swiftest possible response to an enemy nuclear attack while also reducing the risk of human error, could lead to an accidental war.

At the same time as the Fail Safe movie was getting underway, however, Kubrick was working on Dr. Strangelove, and became worried that Lumet’s film might steal his thunder. It has been suggested by the film writer Gene D. Phillips that the existence of the Fail Safe project influenced Kubrick’s move away from his original plan of treating Strangelove as a straight drama and his decision to make a satire instead—this would differentiate it from Lumet’s movie. In any case, he also embarked on another line of attack, launching a legal action to prevent it being released first on the basis that the Fail-Safe novel was unduly derivative of the novel on which Strangelove was based, Peter George’s Red Alert.

Eventually, the Columbia studio took over the distribution of both films and had little to gain by bringing them out close to each other, so Strangelove did appear first, some eight months before Fail Safe. This did Fail Safe few favours and, despite positive critical reception, it wasn’t a commercial success. Audiences unaware of the background manoeuvring might understandably have thought that Fail Safe was merely following a trail blazed by Strangelove, although ironically the influence was (if anything) in the other direction; David Hughes in The Complete Kubrick, for example, argues that the character of Strangelove himself was based on Groeteschele in the novel Fail-Safe.

An amusing aside to this is that General Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the Air Force, was sufficiently perturbed by what he saw as negative fictional portrayals of the nation’s nuclear forces that he encouraged the production of a much more gung-ho film about Strategic Air Command, the Rock Hudson vehicle A Gathering of Eagles (1963). Needless to say, that is now completely forgotten, while Kubrick’s film is almost a household name and Lumet’s, even if not quite as famous, remains much admired.

It’s not a slick film. The low budget is obvious—virtually the entire story unfolds in four interior sets—and a great deal of it is given over to didactic discussion. In both respects, it recalls Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1975); indeed, Fail Safe could very easily be adapted as a stage play as 12 Angry Men was, and when it was remade for TV in 2000 it was broadcast live on CBS, just as the television version of 12 Angry Men which came before the movie had been. Having said that, just as with the 1957 film, these limitations do it little harm. It is completely plausible that government decision-makers dealing with a nuclear crisis would be confined to single rooms, just as members of a jury are, and equally plausible that they would spend much of their time discussing ideas rather than engaging in the more character-driven dialogue that fills most movies.

The film starts with a dream sequence, oddly uncomfortable, the dream belonging to US Air Force Brigadier General Black (Dan O’Herlihy). When he awakes we realise he is stressed about work, though we’re not sure quite what he does yet; he could be any 1960s organisation man. Soon after, though, we see him in uniform flying a small plane to a meeting at the Pentagon, and from here things rapidly fall into place. Black is by no means the sole focus of the film—it’s much more of an ensemble piece—but he maintains a high profile throughout, particularly as a voice of cautious reason contrasted with the hawkish Professor Groeteschele (Walter Matthau), who is giving a lecture on nuclear strategy at the Pentagon when a crisis erupts.

Groeteschele and his audience at this conference—where theoretical debate soon comes face-to-face with reality—form one of the four groups around which the film is built. As the crisis develops, Fail Safe cuts from them to the president (Henry Fonda) in his bunker with his Russian translator Buck (Larry Hagman, long before Dallas); then to a military group at Strategic Air Command, prominent among them General Bogan (Frank Overton) and Colonel Cascio (Fritz Weaver); and then to the crew of a “Vindicator” nuclear bomber (a fictitious type of aircraft) led by Colonel Grady (Edward Binns), who for most of the film is in the air.

The subject of Groeteschele’s lecture at the Pentagon is accidental war, and that is also the subject of the film. A combination of malfunctioning systems and communication problems leads Grady’s Vindicator and other aircraft accompanying him to believe they have received orders to bomb Moscow. Security procedures are in place to ensure that—in the event of a real conflict—the Soviets couldn’t fool aircrew with fake orders to abort, and these mean that the pilots ignore efforts to recall them. The Soviets, of course, regard the Vindicators’ incursion into their airspace as the beginning of an attack; it would make sense (from their point of view) for them to counterattack the US before the Americans can get any more bombs in the air; a completely accidental nuclear war looks imminent.

A large part of Fail Safe’s purpose is to warn about this possibility (one which has, in different ways, been a fear since the beginning of the nuclear era), and in the process it also highlights differences in opinion that existed toward nuclear strategy, toward automation and the Soviet Union. Everybody takes a side.

Groeteschele is a hawk who cares little about the devastation that a nuclear exchange will cause. His academic approach has led him to a level of abstraction where he believes the survival of American rather than Russian culture—as opposed to people—is what matters; the body count is of little importance as long as his side “wins”. He is more concerned about rescuing corporate records from a threatened American city than evacuating the population. In any case, he believes the Soviets will just surrender out of self-interest once the American bombs have fallen: “These are Marxist fanatics, not normal people… they are calculating machines”, he says, a line rich in irony on many levels.

He’s presented by Fail Safe as the real threat to peace because his arguments are superficially so objective and well-reasoned (they simply omit any consideration of morality or humanity). Colonel Cascio is more viscerally anti-Soviet—he believes they have manufactured the whole situation, and at one point he finds it physically impossible to give them classified information even though it might avert war—while a weirder, even more extreme form of pro-war sentiment is voiced early on by Miss Wolfe (Nancy Berg), who Groeteschele has met at a party. The scene with her is strangely disturbing, partly because her attempted seduction of him is so out of keeping with what we already know to be the topic of the film, but also because of what she says about nuclear war: “That’s the beauty of it… we all know we’re going to die, but you make a game of it, a marvellous game.”

At the other end of the scale is Buck the translator—an ordinary man given access to the corridors (or bunkers) of power, just as the audience is by the film itself, and who stands for us—and, as the voices of reason, General Black and the President (Henry Fonda).

Neither the writing nor the direction is in the slightest subtle—an issue film critic Pauline Kael criticised in Lumet’s work generally—but it was his efficiency with time and budget as a director that got him the job, and the simple, economical style that he displayed from 12 Angry Men to Serpico (1973) and beyond is very much on display here. After some introductory scenes, the film is almost entirely set in those four spaces, occasionally using phones and radios to bring in others: like the film’s characters, we never directly see a single Russian or anything of their country though we are reminded repeatedly that these unseen, unknown counterparts on the other side must at every moment be doing exactly what the Americans are.

The wall between them is broken through, just occasionally, when the President talks to the Soviet premier, and poignantly when General Bogan looks at a file photo of a Soviet officer with whom he is chatting and the man’s family. They had both been posted in London in the past, it turns out; “Goodbye, my friend,” both say at the end of their conversation; they are not enemies but they are caught in systems that are.

The bigger picture, meanwhile, is shown on the giant map displays that the military uses to track their and the enemy’s aircraft (and indeed unknown craft, referred to as “UFOs” without any extraterrestrial implications). These, complete with scrolling textual information, are well-deployed by Lumet even if occasionally the audience would benefit from a little longer to study them.

But they’re about as flashy as Fail Safe gets. There’s no music despite Lumet being a lover of classical music and opera, for example, and his filming style is for the most part extremely straightforward—he deliberately kept camera movement to a minimum so it was more effective when it did happen. But he does plenty with limited resources. Black-and-white itself helps give the film a feeling of documentary reality (just as in John Frankenheimer’s The Train from the same year) and the cinematography also makes it clear where Lumet’s opinions lie. There are more close-ups for Buck and the President than for other characters, personalising them, while Groeteschele is at one point depicted overlit with his head at an angle, evidently suggesting an unbalanced man.

The four main settings are lit quite differently according to a scheme that may well be symbolic: Strategic Air Command in noirish chiaroscuro (the novel itself mentions “pools of darkness”) and the Vindicator cockpit similarly dark, while the White House bunker is much brighter and the Pentagon—as the interface between the military and civilian worlds—is in-between. Stock footage is sometimes rendered in negative for a ghostly effect, and there is some powerfully rapid editing at the end, with the camera zooming into one street scene after another before the entire screen turns white (you can guess what this might mean); it’s reminiscent of the very fast cutting Lumet used for Rod Steiger’s Holocaust memories in The Pawnbroker (1964).

Indeed, the economy of means in Fail Safe never prevents the film from packing a punch, and there are moments of extraordinarily high drama: the unspoken dread in the Vindicator’s cockpit as the orders to bomb Moscow are opened, and the President’s conversations with the Russian premier, for example.

Apart from a handful of scenes like the opening glimpse of General Black’s home and a brief detour for the film to visit Colonel Cascio’s parents, the latter of which seems out of place and unnecessary (possibly a point is being made about the Colonel’s psychology, though it’s not clear what), the characters are doing jobs throughout, and for the most part, not jobs where a great deal of individuality is encouraged. For many of the actors, there is limited scope to stand out, but inevitably Fonda does as the President—very much the kind of President who’s so humane and intelligent he’s not quite believable, like Martin Sheen’s Jed Bartlet in The West Wing (1999-2006)—and so, even more, does Matthau as Groeteschele.

From his first appearance at a dinner party, blithely discussing the relative merits of 60 million and 100 million casualties in a nuclear war, he represents everything that Fonda’s President does not; Lumet said he was based on the strategist Herman Kahn, although it’s also easy to see a resemblance to Henry Kissinger, who is name-checked in the novel of Fail Safe and whose 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy shared with Groeteschele the idea that limited nuclear war could be “won”. The 2000 TV remake cast Hank Azaria in this role, opposite Richard Dreyfuss as the President, with George Clooney and Harvey Keitel among the military.

Fail Safe is an anti-nuclear film, but it’s more than that. Its real bugbear is automation, and more broadly the putting of trust in theory rather than humanity. Early on it is observed that aircrews are rotated to avoid any personal friendships or dislikes developing among them, and this small organisational detail represents a system of defence in which what the pilot Colonel Grady calls “the personal factor” is being eliminated. “After us, the machines,” Grady says. “We’re halfway there already”. Not only the enemy is dehumanised in this war.

The “marvellous game” of mutually assured destruction and preemptive strikes, as Miss Wolfe so disquietingly describes it, was very real; Daniel Ellsberg, who was a nuclear strategist in the private sector before turning whistleblower with the Pentagon Papers, describes it vividly in his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Figuring out how to “win” a war against the Soviets, at least on paper, grew so theoretical that it became entirely divorced from the actual consequences of any such war. When one of the Vindicator pilots in Fail Safe heading to bomb Moscow observes that “there’s nothing to go home to, anyway”, he is stating a reality that the planners didn’t so much overlook as considered unimportant.

Nobody is immune from this mindset. Without giving too much away, it’s safe to say that at the end of Fail Safe the worst possible disaster is swapped for only a terrible one, but even the terrible one isn’t necessary in objective terms—it only has to happen because the American and Soviet leaders are locked into the logic of nuclear conflict. The fact that it seems a “win” on some level, that it seems like a sensible utilitarian solution, underlines this.

So do many other films about nuclear war: an important strand in nuclear movie filmography is the risk of strategy—and automation—going wrong. Films like Colossus: The Forbin Project and WarGames echo Fail Safe in warning about the risk of handing too much power to machines (although the first one then goes in an unexpected direction). One of Strangelove’s biggest gags is the notion of strategic innovation (the Soviet doomsday machine) which sounds like a masterstroke of brilliance on paper, but is useless in doing its job: theory taking primacy over reality.

Even the thoroughly entertainment-driven Crimson Tide hinges, at the pivotal central argument between Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman, not only on personalities but also on a strategic debate that enters philosophical territory: is it better to not launch when defence is needed (and passively allow disaster to happen), or to launch when defence is not needed (and actively cause disaster to happen)? While there are other films such as The Day After (1983) and Threads (1984) which focus on nuclear war’s impact, without being very concerned as to how it started or why, even they tend to emphasise the sheer scale of death and destruction—its dehumanisation—rather than individual stories. Again, these films suggest horror not only at the actual outcome of such a conflict but at the way that people have become irrelevant pawns.

The next such films will doubtless have artificial intelligence front and centre. But although Fail Safe’s specific Cold War setting is of course dated in many details, it never feels anything other than immediate, real and immensely dangerous. Lumet’s mostly fly-on-the-wall direction gives the relentless narrative a potency that a more melodramatic treatment would not have achieved, and as a story not only of how a particular nuclear conflict might erupt but also of how people blinded by theory and technology might allow it to happen, Fail Safe has few equals.

USA | 1964 | 112 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Sidney Lumet.
writer: Walter Bernstein (based on the novel by Eugene Burdick & Harvey Wheeler).
starring: Dan O’Herlihy, Walter Matthau, Frank Overton, Edward Binns, Fritz Weaver, Henry Fonda & Larry Hagman.