Fail-Safe
Every generation lives in the shadow of the monsters it has created, expressed through the media of that age; so it was that as mechanisation modernised the ancient art of war that H G Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, that the unleashing of the power of the atom over Japan in 1945 gave rise to Godzilla, that fears for the environment and the future and global plague brought Quatermass and The Walking Dead.
Based on the novel of the same name by political scientists Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler and first serialised in the Saturday Evening Post in October 1962 with the first installment published only days before the Cuban Missile Crisis, director Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe was the second major motion picture of 1964 to examine the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Premiered ten months after Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, itself based on Peter George’s 1958 thriller Red Alert, Lumet observes in his commentary on Criterion’s restored Blu-ray edition of Fail-Safe that it would have been more advantageous for both had his film been released first, Strangelove unfortunately priming audiences to take Fail-Safe less seriously when it could instead have provided context for Kubrick’s satire had it been seen first.
Lumet having worked in live television drama before moving to feature films, he assembled an ensemble cast accustomed to working in those unforgiving conditions, many of whom he had worked with before in that career and in his features who were equally invested in the project: “A great many of us got involved with the picture because we did care about the way things were going politically.”
Among them were the great Henry Fonda from Lumet’s 12 Angry Men as the President of the United States of America, called upon to beg his counterpart in the USSR to not retaliate when a technological failure results in a nuclear strike being accidentally authorised against Moscow, RoboCop‘s Dan O’Herlihy as USAF Brigadier General Warren Black, in charge of the Strategic Air Command, Star Trek‘s Frank Overton as General Bogan and The Twilight Zone‘s Fritz Weaver as Colonel Cascio.
The protocols and processes of war established, ultimately it is about men – and they are all men – in a protected underground room making decisions about faceless masses, and if there is a monster in Fail-Safe it is the formidable Walter Matthau as Professor Groeteschele, a reptilian expert on nuclear war whose mantra dictates that any action which eliminates the threat of communism is justified, a proponent of a twisted American dream where his only reaction to mass murder is the thrill of the numbers, forty million dead, sixty million, a hundred, seeing no difference between military and civilian targets.
Independently financed and shot on a shoestring with rehearsals undertaken like a stage play, most of the money went on the SAC set and no cooperation was forthcoming from the armed forces who refused to provide stock footage, necessitating the creation of the animated tactical display which dominates the film, a clinical analysis of the imminent horror which instead focuses attention on the performances, Lumet favouring close-ups and long takes with nowhere for the actors to hide from the truth of the moment, with no soundtrack to offer comfort or respite.
In addition to Lumet’s commentary recorded in 2000, hesitant but illuminating and full of praise for his cast and crew of trusted associates, the new edition of Fail-Safe also contains a short documentary from the same year with Lumet, O’Herlihy, screenwriter Walter Bernstein and George Clooney who produced the remake released that year and a new interview with film critic J Hoberman giving context to the cold war and the nuclear cinema of the fifties and sixties.
Fail-Safe is available on Blu-ray from Monday 3rd February as part of the Criterion Collection
