Writing about Level 7, Mordecai Roshwald’s fable of atomic armageddon, moved me to take another look at Fail-Safe (1964), a film based on the novel of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. Rewatching it evoked a time I remember well: the climactic days of the Cold War, with its tense confrontations in a divided Berlin, its periodic nuclear weapons tests and, above all the Cuban Missile Crisis, an alarmingly close brush with all-out nuclear war. In those days it seemed entirely plausible that humanity might destroy itself and the planet: Having armed themselves with terrifying weapons, surely the superpowers would eventually use them. But that never happened and today books and films like Fail-Safe no longer sound the urgent note of warning that their creators intended. They do, however, preserve the psychological atmospherics of a bygone age.
Fail-Safe, the film, has always been overshadowed by its celebrated contemporary, Dr. Strangelove, and most would agree that the latter is a superior piece of work. Still, Fail-Safe does has its virtues, including a literate script and solid casting, though unfortunately the plot mechanism that sets the film in motion is rather implausible. Briefly to summarize, when the failure of an electronic component results in the transmission of a false attack order to a group of US Air Force nuclear bombers on airborne alert, Soviet jamming prevents the group commander from confirming the order verbally. But since the fail-safe system has transmitted what appears to be a valid attack order, Group Six, with its load of ten 20-megaton hydrogen bombs, heads toward the Soviet Union. Target: Moscow.
The balance of Fail-Safe recounts the increasingly desperate efforts by US officials to prevent Group Six from striking its target. The action takes place in four settings: Strategic Air Command Headquarters (Omaha, Nebraska), the underground War Room at the Pentagon, the presidential bunker under the White House, and the cockpit of the lead bomber of Group Six.
But why does it prove so difficult to recall Group Six? We learn that Soviet jamming prevents SAC headquarters in Omaha from issuing a recall order by voice radio—which must be sent within ten minutes of the transmission of the attack order. After that, in accordance with standard operating procedures, Group Six will disregard any order transmitted by voice, even if it purports to come from the President himself, the nuclear war planners having reasoned that the voices of senior officials and officers could be imitated. Once that ten-minute window of opportunity closes, Group Six can only be recalled via the automated fail-safe system—which has malfunctioned.
The thoughtful viewer will wonder, though: Why is no effort made to track down and repair the malfunction in the fail-safe system? Furthermore, why has no provision been made for a coded verbal recall order? In the real world this would surely have counted as an extraordinary oversight. After all, one of the arguments in favor of the manned nuclear bomber is that unlike an ICBM, it can be recalled before striking its target. And from what we know of real-world US nuclear war plans, such redundancies are hardwired into the system. This is why an accidental war of the kind envisioned by Fail-Safe has always been an extremely remote possibility. (Far more plausible is the premise of Dr. Strangelove: that a rogue officer in control of nuclear weapons might touch off a war.) But in Fail-Safe, the system is actually fail-deadly. And that just doesn’t make sense.
Still, despite this hole in its plot Fail-Safe works well on several levels. For the first-time viewer, there is genuine suspense: Can Group Six be stopped? And the film's Cold War atmospherics are dead on target. In the early Sixties, when Fail-Safe was conceived, written and turned into a movie, the bipolar world order seemed immutable and eternal. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were armed to the teeth with thousands of nuclear weapons, and their constantly intensifying rivalry, punctuated by repeated crises, made global thermonuclear nuclear war seem inevitable. Fail-Safe plays effectively on those Cold War fears and anxieties.
Of the performances, my favorite is Larry Hagman as Buck, the President's Russian translator, who on the hot line to Moscow becomes the voice and assumes the persona of the Soviet premier. Walter Matthau is also outstanding as Professor Groeteschele, a political scientist and expert on nuclear war who happens to be present in the Pentagon War Room on the day of the crisis. The seasoned character actor Ed Binns turns in a solid performance as Colonel Grady, the commander of Group Six. So does Frank Overton as General Bogan, the commanding general of SAC. Henry Fonda's portrayal of the President is typically stoic, if not particularly inspired.
The weakest performances are by Fritz Weaver as General Bogan's aide, Colonel Cascio, and Dan O'Herlihy as the tragic General Black. Mostly the trouble is that their parts are over-written. Cascio is the obligatory weak link, the man who cracks up under the stress of crisis; Black is the martyr who must commit the film's final, terrible act. The implausible melodrama of Cascio's crack-up sounds a jarring note that reminds you that you are, after all, watching a movie. A quieter, more sinister mode of madness would have been more effective. As for General Black, he's a tortured soul from the start—the uniformed apostate who questions the fundamental assumptions of nuclear war strategy. The astute viewer soon realizes that whatever happens, Black is going to be sacrificed. Perhaps if he'd been portrayed as a carefree flyboy, in love with the technology, heedless of its ultimate purposes, his sacrifice would seem more heroic. But having served up a Christ-like character, Fail-Safe more or less had to crucify him. You can see it coming a mile off.
The look and sound of Fail-Safe are appropriately gritty: shot in stark black and white, with a soundtrack full of spooky electronic noise substituting for a musical score. It's interesting to see what counted as cutting-edge technology in 1964: toggle switches the size of your thumb, huge consoles and mainframe computers, ticker-tape readouts, stick-drawing Big Board graphics, etc. Owing to the non-cooperation of the Defense Department, the aerial footage is less than impressive. But this is a minor flaw. Though they had little to go on but their imaginations, the makers of Fail-Safe succeeded in creating a realistic SAC War Room, and that set carries the film visually.
Most assessments of Fail-Safe are colored by politics, and it's true enough that the film's scenario bears more than a tinge of old-time Ban-the-Bombism. When it was released in 1964, the Cuban Missile Crisis was only two years in the past and Fail-Safe’s message reflects the standard-issue left-liberalism of the day. The very real issues between the US and the USSR are discounted and the Cold War is ascribed to mutual suspician and fear. This message is embodied in the character of Professor Groeteschele, who preaches that the leaders of the Soviet Union are Marxist fanatics, hell-bent on the conquest of the world. As Group Six approaches Moscow he argues that the President should order a full-scale attack on the USSR, thus ending the threat of communism for all time. Groeteschele is supposedly modeled on Henry Kissinger, who was then a young academic with political connections, and especially on Herman Kahn, the well-known—one might almost say notorious—author of the book On Thermonuclear War. But Groeteschele’s ideas are no more than a crude caricature of Kahn’s thought and strategic analysis.
On the other hand, the grotesque anti-military prejudices of contemporary progressivism are absent. The world of Fail-Safe is a world in which good men find themselves trapped in an impossible situation. No one can really be called a villain, not even the sinister Groeteschele. Like everyone else, he’s a prisoner of history, a bit player in a cosmic tragedy.
Unlike Dr. Strangelove—a comic masterpiece and a work for the ages—Fail-Safe is no more than an earnest period piece. For the Cold War it depicts has passed into history, and the bipolar world is no more. Still, for those of us who remember the coldest season of the Cold War, this film still has the power to send a shiver up the spine. Imperfectly but effectively, it memorializes the tensions and anxieties of a moment in time that some believed would mark humanity’s suicidal demise. Yet here we are in 2022, arguing about the threat of terrorism, the threat of global warming, the threat of Donald Trump, the threat of Russia and China and North Korea, etc. The End Times are upon us now, just as they were in 1964. But for all that, the only thing we can say for sure amounts to a tautology: that the future lies ahead. And Fail-Safe has been left behind.