FAIL SAFE: Blu-ray (Columbia, 1964) Criterion Collection

In his 1846 poem, Ode, inscribed to William H. Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind,” prophetic words with practical application to Sidney Lumet’s 1964 Cold War drama, Fail Safe. The runaway best seller, published two years prior by a pair of academics, Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, marks a startling realization that, regardless of the strategic barriers set in place to stave off the Cold War, a total nuclear holocaust is not only quite possible, but was then becoming a more imminent reality by the hour. The authors had just cause for concern; President Kennedy’s foiled invasion of Castro’s tiny isle in 1962, and the narrowly averted cataclysm of the Cuban Missile Crisis raising the specter of world-wide annihilation to frantic panic levels. While the public remained white-knuckled, building fallout shelters in their backyards, their children taught to ‘duck and cover’ in their classrooms, authors and film-makers had a field day exploiting the possibilities for entertainment purposes. The Kennedy years, while inculcated in a climate of high-styled optimism, were as equally marred by anxiety and political frustrations exacerbated between America and the Soviet Union; the presidential assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, putting a distinct period to the lithe counterbalance of Kennedy’s promise for a new era in which both sides might discover an amicable way of getting along.

In Hollywood, the prospects of transforming Fail Safe into a major motion picture were almost immediately dashed by two opposing forces: the first, the U.S. State Department, and their absolute refusal to entertain even the notion of allowing Lumet and his production access – either to their actual fighter planes or even raw military footage to be inserted into the production later on. Hence, the eventual ‘bootleg’ of a single fighter jet taking off was re-framed and composited in the editing process to give the illusion of 5 fighter jets on route to their ill-fated destiny. The other hurdle for the movie was a lawsuit, launched to infer that its similarities to Stanley Kubrick’s production of Dr. Strangelove (1964) were tantamount to plagiarism. Delaying the general release of Lumet’s minor masterpiece by a scant few months, the world premiere of Fail Safe had the unhappy circumstance of coming on the heels of Kubrick’s wildly popular pic; the farce of nuclear war, as depicted in Dr. Strangelove, diffusing both the public’s interests in seeing Lumet’s movie, but also, in their being able to take its premise seriously. Thus, Fail Safe was met with disingenuous ennui from audiences who saw it, but mostly empty theaters that failed to latch on to the gushing praise lauded over it by the critics.     

Shot in B&W, Albert Brenner’s production design and Gerald Hirschfeld’s cinematography plays down the key-lit gloss of a Hollywood-ized depiction of such dramatic events, with Lumet – who had begun his career in television – frequently establishing a thoroughly claustrophobic atmosphere by utilizing extreme close-ups, strong, almost noir-ish shadows, and devastating moments of silence, interpolated between characters as the mounting dread of this doomsday scenario becomes a mind-numbing reality. The movie divides most of its run time between the underground bunker at the White House where Henry Fonda’s unnamed ‘President’ and his Russian translator, Buck (Larry Hagman) conclude the unstoppable nature of the tragedy about to unfold; the Pentagon war conference room, where cynical academic, Dr. Groeteschele (Walter Matthau, utterly superb and shocking ruthless) suggests the only solution to this face-off is to proceed with war and let the survivors remain as best they can after the nuclear winter; the SAC war room, overseen by stalwart loyalist, Gen. Bogan (Frank Overton), but nearly overtaken by the decaying sanity of Col. Cascio (Fritz Weaver), and finally, a single bomber cockpit - the plane, flown by Col. Jack Grady (Edward Binns) – so completely invested in the mission, not even the overwhelming pleas of his wife (Janet Ward) can dissuade him from dropping his megaton payload of hydrogen bombs on an unsuspecting Moscow.

Fail Safe is a sobering reminder of how quickly the tenuous balance between nations can turn fatal; the end brought about, not by any executive decision from a power-mad statesmen, but  rather, a critical mechanical malfunction in the defense computer mainframe, prompting its military personnel to move into position, even when no imminent threat to national security exists.  The lack of U.S. government support for this movie forced Lumet and his movie-makers to rely almost exclusively on illustrating the whole of the aerial dogfight between the U.S. bombardiers, their own fighter pilots, and, intercepting Russian planes, engaged to shoot down the bombers before they reach their target, on a gigantic electronic map, shown twice – once, at the Pentagon; then again, at SAC Headquarters. The movie begins with Brigadier General Warren A. Black (Dan O’Herlihy) suffering another of his chronic nightmares. In it, he pictures himself attending a bullfight, powerless to prevent the kill of the magnificent beast, and struggling, in fact, to remain conscious while he observes such shameless and wasteful carnage. Awakening in a cold sweat, Black confides in his devoted wife, Betty (Hildy Parks) before being summoned to attend a VIP conference at Strategic Air Command (SAC), at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska.

Meanwhile, at an elegant Washington house party, Professor Groeteschele is entertaining his hosts with theories on who would likely survive an all-out nuclear holocaust; Groeteschele, playfully hypothesizing that only prison inmates and file clerks – each protected behind heavy bunkers of concrete – would likely be immune from the fallout and radiation, emerging to face the new dawn of civilization. While the convicts would have brute force and violence on their side, the file clerks would possess organization. The party ends with Groeteschele taking one of the slightly inebriated party guests, Jenny (Frieda Altman) home. She playfully flirts with the professor, suggesting the end of the world as an erotic thrill that Groeteschele finds repulsive.  During a routine inspection of American airspace, fighter jets intercept an aircraft flying in restricted airspace. This turns out to be a harmless commercial airliner having flown off course. The raid is canceled, though not before a malfunction in the early warning radar causes the American bomber flown by Col. Grady to receive false orders for a nuclear attack on the city of Moscow. Attempts to rescind these orders repeatedly fail as the bomber crosses over into U.S.S.R. controlled air space and the new Soviet countermeasure effectively jams all broadcast signals, barring effective radio communications past the point of no return.

In Washington, the President’s contact with the Soviet chairman results in more narrow-minded confusion and ambiguity between the two super powers. While the Soviet chairman agrees to un-jam the radio signal to allow both the President and Grady’s wife to speak to him directly, in the hopes of dissuading him from his mission, Grady has been trained to ignore any oral communication as possible Russian propaganda. The President retaliates by sending American fighters to down his own bombers. And while the fighter jets are successful at bringing down four of the five planes carrying their nuclear payload; Grady’s jet proceeds unimpeded to its fixed target. Demanding a proportionate response for the devastation soon to befall the citizens of Moscow, the President sends another bomber on route to Manhattan. By destroying New York and killing millions of his own citizens he will prove to the Russians that no such act of aggression towards them was ever intended, and thus, ensure the preservation of world peace following the annihilation to both nations. However, the sacrifice is even more personal, in that the First Lady is currently visiting New York City. The President’s decision shocks everyone except Gen. Black who, having been assigned the tenuous last flight over Manhattan, deems it a fitting end to his prophetic nightmares. After discharging his duty by dropping the nuclear bombs on the Big Apple, Black takes a cyanide capsule. The penultimate moments of the movie depict an ordinary day in the lives of New Yorkers, caught completely unaware of their tragic fate only seconds away.

Fail Safe’s failure at the box office relegated it to late-night television fodder almost immediately. There, it began to garner a reputation as one of the most staggering critiques of the nuclear age yet put on film. The picture’s ‘star billing’ is curious to say the least; first, in that actor, Dan O’Herlihy – top-billed, was hardly of the same name-drawing recognition at the box office as Henry Fonda (sixth billed), but also, because Fonda dominates the middle and last acts of the picture with a presence and integrity that no other name in the cast can rival. Walter Matthau, as yet not established as the cinema’s fine comedian, is riveting here as the steely-eyed and clinically cold-hearted academic advisor who perceives nuclear fate from a purely analytic perspective and its thereafter haunted when his own scenario of a proportionate response is carried over into the President’s final solution to the nuclear stalemate between the U.S. and Russia. The picture also notably features Dom DeLuise and Sorrell Booke in cameos, as Sgt. Collins and Congressman Raskob respectively. Viewed today, Fail Safe has not entirely dated, despite its Cold War premise, because the tenuous nature of diplomacy between the super powers still exists. Fonda’s monumental performance as the forthright and honorable man forced into an impossible situation - to sacrifice his own wife, not to mention the lives of millions of American citizens, merely to prove his devotion to the uneasy balance between opposing nations - is gripping entertainment, arguably, matched by Larry Hagman’s complicated turn as his Russian translator.  At once, Hagman conveys the nerve-jangling confrontational fallout of his counterpoint in the U.S.S.R. via telephone, and, the emotional content of his own character – which is considerable and heartfelt. Written by then blacklisted writer, Walter Bernstein, and superbly conceived by Lumet’s storytelling prowess to maintain its nail-biting intensity right until the end, Fail Safe is a movie not so easily digestible or forgettable, once seen. Everyone should experience it at least once. For many, however, once may be quite enough.

Criterion releases Fail Safe to Blu-ray via their ongoing alliance with Sony Pictures, the custodians of the old Columbia catalog. Owing to improperly archived elements over the years, Criterion’s new 4K digital restoration is a mixed blessing at best. The B&W image toggles between moments of thoroughly satisfying precision in its gray scale tonality, revealing fine details and lightly textured grain appearing indigenous to its source, and others where the image is so thick and clumpy as to obliterate all fine detail from the screen, with grain so thick, it is distracting. The vintage footage of the bullfight, as well as the bootlegged inserts of the fighter plane taking off notwithstanding, the studio-bound recreations do not fair all that much better when image quality falters. We get another PCM mono soundtrack. Alas, in spots, it remains slightly garbled and/or muffled. From 2000, we get an audio commentary featuring Sidney Lumet who has exceptional recall on the making of the movie. We also get ‘Fail Safe Revisited’ – a featurette produced in 2000 to mark the remake, starring George Clooney, and featuring sound bites from Dan O’Herlihy, Walter Bernstein, Sidney Lumet and, of course, Clooney. Criterion has also shelled out for a new interview piece with film critic, J. Hoberman, who manages to contextualize the Cold War climate and Fail Safe’s place within it. Finally, Criterion offers us a printed essay by critic, Bilge Ebiri. Bottom line: Fail Safe is a riveting movie. As with virtually all of Sidney Lumet’s movies, the storytelling is solid. However, ‘the message’ tends to slightly obscure its renewable entertainment value. This Blu-ray is hardly perfect, but likely can look no better. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

3.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

3.5

EXTRAS

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