Fail-Safe (1964)
Feb. 19th, 2023 04:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficThe other night, I suggested S and I watch WarGames (1983) because I’d never seen it and it gets referenced a lot. It’s much better as a distillation of a moment--both in our thinking about the Cold War and nuclear policy and in our thinking about supercomputers and the emergent culture of hackers--than it is as a movie per se. (Oh lord, the music. Oh, the hacky writing.)
In reading reviews of WarGames, I found one that called it “Fail-Safe for the computer age.” So I went—huh. What’s Fail-Safe?
Fail-Safe is a 1964 thriller about nuclear war starring Walter Matthau and Henry Fonda (also Larry Hagman, most famous as J.R. of “Who shot J.R.?” but fantastic in this), directed by Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Network, Dog Day Afternoon and many others). It happens in real time as a standard procedure of sending bombers with thermonuclear warheads to stand ready at “fail-safe” points whenever there is an unidentified aircraft detected in US air space leads to an accidental go signal to one of the bomber groups.
As S and I were watching, we kept pausing and going—huh. This is really like Dr. Strangelove. This is really like Dr. Strangelove. Holy shit, was Dr. Strangelove imitating this? Why is this film completely forgotten?
The answer is—no, Dr. Strangelove is not imitating Fail-Safe. Both are based on books, Red Alert for Strangelove and Fail-Safe, whose plots were so similar that there was a lawsuit. A lawsuit Kubrick instigated when he found out about the film production of Fail-Safe. The lawsuit was settled, but part of the settlement was that Columbia, which was distributing Strangelove, would also distribute Fail-Safe, which was an independent picture.
Then Kubrick buried it.
Dr. Strangelove came out in January of 1964, and Fail-Safe was held until Strangelove was completely out of theaters, releasing in October 1964. After you watch a satire of something, it’s hard to watch the deadly earnest version. Fonda even said he couldn’t have acted in this if he’d seen Strangelove first. So Fail-Safe bombed (if you pardon the expression) at the box office and disappeared into obscurity.
I watched Dr. Strangelove in school as part of learning the history of the Cold War. It might have been more effective to watch Fail-Safe instead.
This is an absolutely stunning movie—one of those films you watch and just need to talk about to everyone. It is shot in high contrast black and white, like a newsreel, and every frame is gorgeous. The acting is fantastic. It’s so tightly written that I kept pausing and saying to S, that’s exactly what would happen. That is an incredibly insightful analysis of the situation. I agree with this entire argument.
And it’s also one of the most upsetting films I’ve ever seen. Unlike Strangelove, whose commentary is look what boobs and egomaniacal children are in power, everyone in Fail-Safe is competent, intelligent, and acting in good faith to the best of their ability with their understanding of the situation. Which makes the events of the movie more and more horrifying. Fail-Safe’s central point is that a machine will do what it was built to do, and if you build a machine to murder millions of civilians, that’s what it will do.
Matthau in this movie plays a political scientist, based on Herman Khan, who was also the inspiration for the character Dr. Strangelove. Matthau’s character is giving a briefing to the joint chiefs of staff when the movie begins, and serves as the voice for the thought that lead to the creation of the infrastructure of mutually assured destruction. Fail-Safe is trying to show that the evil is that type of thought—because it doesn’t take into account that systems don’t work perfectly. Accidents happen. And if you load a gun and point it at someone then take the safety off about six times a month, one of those times, the gun is going to fire. That’s what it was built to do.
So I’d very much like more people to watch this movie and come talk to me about it, but I fully understand why one would chose not to.
***SPOILERS***
There are a number of things that strike me as so different between the Cold War understanding in 1964 versus 1983. In 1983, one of the things that stops WarGames is asking, is it reasonable to believe that the Soviets would unprovoked launch a full out attack? And in 1964, people throughout the military absolutely believe that they would. Their estimation of Soviet technology is infinite—even when there is no evidence that an attack is happening, some people cling to a belief that it might be happening and the Soviets have just developed technology far beyond our ability to detect or counter.
I had not realized how large a psychic scar Pearl Harbor left on the American military in its paranoic fear that it would again be attacked without provocation or warning.
Fonda plays the president in this, clearly modeled on Eisenhower. As he struggles to convince the Russian premiere that the bombers launched on Moscow are an accident and not a first strike, he is struggling not to convince one man, but to convince all of Soviet leadership, which means even at a point where the premiere believes it’s an accident, he can’t back down from retaliation without proof.
Early in this film, this is the US sending fighters to shoot down the bombers—even though they are too far away, and this will mean that they expend all their fuel trying to catch up and then crash into the Arctic Ocean. It’s a futile suicide run. And the president orders it because the Russians will see them send their own fighters to their deaths and therefore believe this is in earnest.
As it becomes increasingly clear that the Russians will not be able to stop all of the bombers—even with full cooperation from the US military (which causes an attempt at a coup, as the president orders divulging classified secrets to the Russians), the President makes an offer to the Russians. If the bomber succeeds in dropping two warheads on Moscow, he will order a US bomber to drop two warheads on New York City. Fonda talks about the sacrifice of Abraham—being ready to sacrifice Isaac but praying god will stay his hand. He asks the premiere if the offer is itself enough to prevent Russian retaliation, and no it is not. And you get the clear sense that that is not because the premiere wants it, but because he could not hope to control his own military without it.
And that’s how the movie ends. There’s no showing of nuclear explosions like in Strangelove, but the way they play the dropping of the bombs is infinitely more upsetting.
The moment the credits rolled, I went, my god, that would be the end of both countries. The president would be assassinated immediately. The military would completely fracture. You probably wouldn’t even get a chance to begin full scale disarmament before individual generals who didn’t believe it was an accident retaliated. And then the conspiracy theories. And then the deniers.
But that’s kind of the point—Matthau begins the movie arguing for “limited war,” with others saying there is no such thing. The end of this movie is so much more disturbing than a million post-nuclear apocalypse narratives, because this isn’t bombing us back to the stone age. This is an America and Russia still mostly intact, but with a loss of life too staggering to psychologically integrate.
And honestly, the fact that this or something like this did not happen is the most shocking part of the history of the Cold War. There’s a reason why all three films—Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe, and WarGames—are not about Russian aggression but instead about American accidents.
A short clip from the movie (the trailer is garbage).
In reading reviews of WarGames, I found one that called it “Fail-Safe for the computer age.” So I went—huh. What’s Fail-Safe?
Fail-Safe is a 1964 thriller about nuclear war starring Walter Matthau and Henry Fonda (also Larry Hagman, most famous as J.R. of “Who shot J.R.?” but fantastic in this), directed by Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Network, Dog Day Afternoon and many others). It happens in real time as a standard procedure of sending bombers with thermonuclear warheads to stand ready at “fail-safe” points whenever there is an unidentified aircraft detected in US air space leads to an accidental go signal to one of the bomber groups.
As S and I were watching, we kept pausing and going—huh. This is really like Dr. Strangelove. This is really like Dr. Strangelove. Holy shit, was Dr. Strangelove imitating this? Why is this film completely forgotten?
The answer is—no, Dr. Strangelove is not imitating Fail-Safe. Both are based on books, Red Alert for Strangelove and Fail-Safe, whose plots were so similar that there was a lawsuit. A lawsuit Kubrick instigated when he found out about the film production of Fail-Safe. The lawsuit was settled, but part of the settlement was that Columbia, which was distributing Strangelove, would also distribute Fail-Safe, which was an independent picture.
Then Kubrick buried it.
Dr. Strangelove came out in January of 1964, and Fail-Safe was held until Strangelove was completely out of theaters, releasing in October 1964. After you watch a satire of something, it’s hard to watch the deadly earnest version. Fonda even said he couldn’t have acted in this if he’d seen Strangelove first. So Fail-Safe bombed (if you pardon the expression) at the box office and disappeared into obscurity.
I watched Dr. Strangelove in school as part of learning the history of the Cold War. It might have been more effective to watch Fail-Safe instead.
This is an absolutely stunning movie—one of those films you watch and just need to talk about to everyone. It is shot in high contrast black and white, like a newsreel, and every frame is gorgeous. The acting is fantastic. It’s so tightly written that I kept pausing and saying to S, that’s exactly what would happen. That is an incredibly insightful analysis of the situation. I agree with this entire argument.
And it’s also one of the most upsetting films I’ve ever seen. Unlike Strangelove, whose commentary is look what boobs and egomaniacal children are in power, everyone in Fail-Safe is competent, intelligent, and acting in good faith to the best of their ability with their understanding of the situation. Which makes the events of the movie more and more horrifying. Fail-Safe’s central point is that a machine will do what it was built to do, and if you build a machine to murder millions of civilians, that’s what it will do.
Matthau in this movie plays a political scientist, based on Herman Khan, who was also the inspiration for the character Dr. Strangelove. Matthau’s character is giving a briefing to the joint chiefs of staff when the movie begins, and serves as the voice for the thought that lead to the creation of the infrastructure of mutually assured destruction. Fail-Safe is trying to show that the evil is that type of thought—because it doesn’t take into account that systems don’t work perfectly. Accidents happen. And if you load a gun and point it at someone then take the safety off about six times a month, one of those times, the gun is going to fire. That’s what it was built to do.
So I’d very much like more people to watch this movie and come talk to me about it, but I fully understand why one would chose not to.
***SPOILERS***
There are a number of things that strike me as so different between the Cold War understanding in 1964 versus 1983. In 1983, one of the things that stops WarGames is asking, is it reasonable to believe that the Soviets would unprovoked launch a full out attack? And in 1964, people throughout the military absolutely believe that they would. Their estimation of Soviet technology is infinite—even when there is no evidence that an attack is happening, some people cling to a belief that it might be happening and the Soviets have just developed technology far beyond our ability to detect or counter.
I had not realized how large a psychic scar Pearl Harbor left on the American military in its paranoic fear that it would again be attacked without provocation or warning.
Fonda plays the president in this, clearly modeled on Eisenhower. As he struggles to convince the Russian premiere that the bombers launched on Moscow are an accident and not a first strike, he is struggling not to convince one man, but to convince all of Soviet leadership, which means even at a point where the premiere believes it’s an accident, he can’t back down from retaliation without proof.
Early in this film, this is the US sending fighters to shoot down the bombers—even though they are too far away, and this will mean that they expend all their fuel trying to catch up and then crash into the Arctic Ocean. It’s a futile suicide run. And the president orders it because the Russians will see them send their own fighters to their deaths and therefore believe this is in earnest.
As it becomes increasingly clear that the Russians will not be able to stop all of the bombers—even with full cooperation from the US military (which causes an attempt at a coup, as the president orders divulging classified secrets to the Russians), the President makes an offer to the Russians. If the bomber succeeds in dropping two warheads on Moscow, he will order a US bomber to drop two warheads on New York City. Fonda talks about the sacrifice of Abraham—being ready to sacrifice Isaac but praying god will stay his hand. He asks the premiere if the offer is itself enough to prevent Russian retaliation, and no it is not. And you get the clear sense that that is not because the premiere wants it, but because he could not hope to control his own military without it.
And that’s how the movie ends. There’s no showing of nuclear explosions like in Strangelove, but the way they play the dropping of the bombs is infinitely more upsetting.
The moment the credits rolled, I went, my god, that would be the end of both countries. The president would be assassinated immediately. The military would completely fracture. You probably wouldn’t even get a chance to begin full scale disarmament before individual generals who didn’t believe it was an accident retaliated. And then the conspiracy theories. And then the deniers.
But that’s kind of the point—Matthau begins the movie arguing for “limited war,” with others saying there is no such thing. The end of this movie is so much more disturbing than a million post-nuclear apocalypse narratives, because this isn’t bombing us back to the stone age. This is an America and Russia still mostly intact, but with a loss of life too staggering to psychologically integrate.
And honestly, the fact that this or something like this did not happen is the most shocking part of the history of the Cold War. There’s a reason why all three films—Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe, and WarGames—are not about Russian aggression but instead about American accidents.
A short clip from the movie (the trailer is garbage).
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