FAIL SAFE @ 60

General Black wakes from another dream of bullfighters. He rises and prepares himself for a conference, tending to his sleeping children and having a conversation with his wife that goes from sleepy small talk to a serious plea for him to retire from military service. The conference stars an academic whose anti-communist fervour has led him to embrace the notion of a contained nuclear war. Meanwhile, some corporate visitors to a monitoring facility witness a near thing when a struggling airliner is temporarily misidentified as a Soviet weapon. Then, a few mishaps and perhaps one deliberate moment of international sabotage later, it's on and it's real. Bombers are sent to Moscow. They are beyond recall. If they can't be stopped, it's war, the kind of war that only needs a day or two to wipe out the only known life in the universe.

Fail Safe, at this distance, is often assumed to be the grim older brother of Dr Strangelove. However, this is down to the times. Cold War tensions were at frightening levels in the early '60s and the two novels that served as the source for the two films might have treated the subject differently but both played to the fear of annihilation. The better known Kubrick film is regarded as a satire classic. Fail Safe is better known as a title than a whole film and that's a pity as the pair are worth companionship in your cinematic consciousness. I won't be doing too much comparison here (best left for when I cover Strangelove) but a significant difference is worth a mention.

The heart of the problem in Strangelove is human. General Jack D. Ripper has a very personal reason for sending the nukes to Russia. The more sober Fail Safe also comments on human folly but expresses it with a look at advanced technology run by brains that haven't caught up to it. The tech on display in Fail Safe is by and large imagined (Kubrick's gets as close to reality as he can) but that means it can look a lot more effective and functional than the available hardware. Dialogue about practical tactics using technology in this film take it into the realm of science fiction which adds a sting. Add to that the warmth of the likes of Henry Fonda's unnamed president and what might have been a stark and unwatchable two hours becomes compelling.

Also, Sidney Lumet. Lumet had form in off-Broadway theatre as well as the fruitful years of tv in the '50s when some pretty chewy social drama was being fashioned. By the time of his cinema debut with 12 Angry Men, he could bring a natural way with actors and a familiarity with the tightness of television shooting whereby close ups on faces are crucial and the blocking is tighter than the most choreographed play. Here he makes the breathless control rooms look by turns as wide as landscapes or as close as broom closets. When the president and his translator are in the tiny room with the big phone, moving toward decisions that will affect life on the planet, their faces can fill the wide frame to a the extent that the close ups are outright rude. The sense is urgency. Lumet had, by this film, an already intimidating rap sheet as a movie maker. 

Lumet is one of the greats who never gets picked out as an auteur the way that even a tv-starting contemporary like John Frankenheimer does. However, if your tastes run to post-war Hollywood through to the end of the century, your favourites will include a few of his titles. He was mainly known for the commitment to tough stories and, as with Fail Safe, his skill at rendering them palatable. When the irony stretches to breaking and the operators in the control room cheer at the destruction of their own war machines we are surprised to share their relief (not a spoiler, btw, there is a lot more to come after that moment) and then agree with the dressing down given by their commander. The stakes are so high here that we have to grasp warmth even in the anger. Strangelove's joke about fighting in the War Room cannot work here. The collapse of control in the control room is left to us as though we are witnesses rather than audience members.

Henry Fonda's President is a fulfilment of casting. He brings a signature blend of down home hickory and gravitas that compels us to graspingly wish his increasingly futile earnestness would just crash through and the world around him would listen and comply. As the body temperature core of the film we want to be in that poley room with him and Larry Hagman when the phone call to the Kremlin gets terrifyingly plain. At the other end of the spectrum there is Walter Matthau's hawkish professor, a brash kill-em-all type with a dangerous confidence in the power of the doomsday weapons and an even more dangerous charisma that has won him popularity.

Lumet did not get the co-operation from the US military and had to improvise. The Vindicator bombers were an invention from the source novel. Rather than work around depicting B52s as Kubrick did, Lumet used footage of smaller range and capacity jets as well as fighters for the aircraft. One approach which shows the planes in negative is effectively eerie. A thought to no great depth will consider this, the refusal by the military to cooperate (echoed joltingly in an on screen disclaimer about the likelihood of the events' probability), to be testament to the closeness to reality: not to the hardware, though, to the thinking. That is what brings Fail Safe from a drama to the stranger territory of a documentary of the imagination.