Fail-Safe. It seems to mean limit, the point of no return. Fail-Safe, a rather stoic film from 1964 about accidental nuclear war, was released a few months after its more famous twin, Dr. Strangelove, an almost doppelganger treatment of the same subject. The later release of Fail-Safe was no accident. According to fact as well as folklore, it was tabled as a result of a lawsuit filed by, among others, Stanley Kubrick, the principal auteur of Strangelove, who will have thought Fail-Safe a rival to his now legendary satire, hence the legal action. Of course, affording Kubrick a commercial head-start was not the reason for the settlement that ensued: producers compromised and agreed that Kubrick’s film would get first release. The premise of the suit was the assertion, apparently upheld, that the script of Fail-Safe, actually based on a novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, was too close in substance to the source material of Strangelove, a Peter George novel called Red Alert, so a copyright infringement was determined. Anyway, in the books, a mechanical failure results in a false order for planes armed with nuclear weapons to attack their targets in the Soviet Union.
The main theme of Fail-Safe, now seemingly hackneyed in our A.I. obsessed angst of the 21st century, is that our machines are getting away from us, that we are moving too fast, being careless in our complacent regard for the power of technology. Okay, so Ukraine, Israel and Hamas notwithstanding, World War Three might finish third in a 2023 list of social concerns, behind, say, privacy erosion or the problem of our carbon foot prints–the problem of being replaced, if not destroyed–but the ominous gist is similar. Back to Fail Safe: the film’s script proceeds logically, setting up the motif: during early scenes, we are given a tour of a military installation, shown how satellite photography can locate the positions of enemy missile sites from space; how Soviet submarines are positioned just fifty miles off the Pacific coast. An overseeing general is proud of the officers and technicians that he commands. He has utmost faith in the reliability of the system they control. He and his subordinates are even unperturbed by a preliminary drama: the appearance of a UFO somewhere in the north Atlantic that triggers an air force alert system. A routine precaution, he blithely says of the monitoring that occurs. A visiting congressman—yeah, what a coinkydink—is not so sure. Somewhat awed, the politician seizes the chance to give pontificating warnings: who’s in control of all this technology? An accompanying academic supplements the concern. The computer systems—remember, this is 1964—operate too quickly, are so sophisticated that despite human oversight, mechanical operations are too subtle to be captured by human beings. Mistakes are inevitable.
Strangelove isn’t nearly as pedantic, or even reverent. Perceiving a darker human theme in the source material, Kubrick’s film alters the premise of the nuclear accident. In Strangelove, the problem is not in the machines per se, but rather in the question that the congressman in Fail-Safe had asked: who’s in charge? Well, a nutjob general not accidentally named Jack Ripper is in charge. In his opening scene, Ripper calls his second in command, inexplicably a foreign exchange officer from the UK, played by Peter Sellers, to announce an attack on the Soviet Union that he personally has authorized, though he implies White House and Pentagon approval. Group captain Mandrake is the sanest character in Strangelove. That is, he is its soul of neurotic denial: a humble officer, a soldier with an eye upon order and reality, plus glitches* in a system that displace from a more fundamental human problem: death wish. Though the reasons for the unwieldy technology in Strangelove are likely the same as those suggested in Fail Safe—namely, the hubris and complacency of leaders—in Strangelove, the deeper problem is the hell bent hatred, paranoia, or just plain lunacy of almost everyone involved.
In Fail Safe, the characters are mostly earnest, well-intentioned, even noble figures. The principal hero is played by Henry Fonda as a fatherly president, not donning that role for the first time, as I recall. Watching Fail Safe today, I can just about imagine Barack Obama playing his part: Fonda is relaxed, genial with subordinates, the everywoman secretary or his nervous Russian translator, played by Larry Hagman, just before his Dream of Jeannie period. Fonda’s character is naturally in charge as he enters the fray. He may not save the day, but he’ll do the right thing, at least. He’ll lead with calmness, compassion and tender strength; issue sage words from time to time, and deliver a great speech at the end. Too bad he can’t do anything about the system that’s gotten out of control. Too bad his familiar voice doesn’t sway a dutiful pilot whom he finally reaches by radio communication. The man can’t follow the presidential order to abort the accidentally-triggered bomb-dropping mission to Moscow because he’s been trained to ignore what may be tricks by the enemy. Interestingly, the scenes where the Fonda character or the wife of the pilot are desperately crying out for mission retreat seem as absurd (or perhaps just over-acted) as anything in Strangelove.
And this would seem to have been why Kubrick and his script-writers changed things ahead of their filming. They just found the scenarios depicted in Red Alert too silly to be taken seriously, so they doubled down, went with the absurdity. The result was a comedy that mocked, not lamented the hubris of military systems. It mocked patriotism, anti-communism, even the sexual neurosis and narcissism that underpins human aggression. As for the concept of “limited” nuclear war, which Fail-Safe addresses like a class lecture inserted into the script’s middle third, Strangelove, uh, blows it away, injecting a comic-book doomsday idea, as introduced by its namesake character, also played by Sellers. It’s unfortunate yet also interesting that Fail-Safe has a less farcical answer to the wheelchair bound loon that Sellers plays. Walter Matthau’s role, similar in purpose to that of the more famous Sellers character, is that of a chip-on-the-shoulder nerd who becomes a virulent political scientist. Actually, he’s an excellent foil to the virtuous Fonda character, or the character of general Black, the man whose angst about nuclear war disturbs his sleep, sending him nightmares in which he identifies with a “killer” matador.
Again, much about the legacy of Fail-Safe seems either unfortunate or sort of…too bad. It’s like its depressive ending: a too serious, too straight-faced handwringing about a hard subject. Even its climactic theme—one of sacrifice (New York gets deliberately nuked by the US to reciprocate for the accidental destruction of Moscow)—seems to reflect its fate as both a film and an artifact of how its audience dealt with mortal terror. In earlier times, during World War II for example, audiences may have clamored for and easily consumed straightforward, hero-worshipping fare in cinema. The crowd would have heeded the dire warnings of artists-as-social critics, but retained its belief that their leaders are good people with our best interests at heart. Had Henry Fonda not been available, then Spencer Tracy might have played the role that delivers fatherly blessings at the end. But 1964 was a turning point on something, I think: JFK had just been assassinated. Vietnam was about to get worse, and America’s sense of being infallible was eroding. Nixon would further the cynicism a decade later, and comedians ranging from Lenny Bruce to Monty Python to Saturday Night Live were altering what we laughed at. Wholesome humor still exists, but edgier tastes seem to dominate, and might have passed a point of no return in our robotic present-day.
We’ll laugh at anything if it’s telling the truth, plus something else perennial: at times we listen more to the jester than the pedagogue. That’s the indelible message of Strangelove, the reason it stands up better than its worthy rival of 1964. It didn’t need the lawsuit to win its lasting influence.
** Incidentally, this program froze on 3 separate occasions during the writing of this blog essay
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 