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Fail-Safe (1964)
Feb. 19th, 2023 04:02 pmThe 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 )
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 )A short clip from the movie (the trailer is garbage).
