Cinema: The Day the Bomb Fell

Fail Safe first appeared as the Domesday Book of 1962, a propagandistic piece of fantascience in which Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler warned the world that at any moment a SAC computer might go crazy and cause a nuclear holocaust. Sold to a Hollywood operator for $500,000, the novel has now been made into a sensational scareshow that for the first hour or so will seem credible to civilians and keep their teeth chattering like Geiger counters. But as a work of art and an effort of polemic, Fail Safe labors under a special difficulty: Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s recent and remarkable black comedy of nuclear nightmare, has effectively stolen its atomic thunder.

In scene after scene, Fail Safe plays like a humdrum remake of Kubrick’s picture.* In both films a unit of the Strategic Air Command launches an H-bomb attack on the Soviet Union—in Dr. Strangelove the attack is inspired by a goofy general, in Fail Safe by a confused computer. In both films a sinister refugee scientist advises the U.S. to follow up the accidental attack with a total strike. In both films the U.S. President (Henry Fonda, a presidential candidate in The Best Man, was evidently elected before the release of Fail Safe) hops to the hot line and tries to persuade the Soviet Premier that the assault is unintentional.

Their first two conversations are harrowing. Walled up in a white cell somewhere under Washington, President Fonda speaks steadily and carefully in a voice that is intense but curiously flat, as though every word were crushed by a burden of significance too great to bear. And as the voice drones on and on, pleading and reasoning and pleading, the figure of the actor slowly swells and charges with tension and importance, the presence of the man becomes the person of mankind and his voice the voice of the species pleading for its life. The whole of history seems consummated in an instant; Armageddon rages in a telephone booth.

In these and several other scenes, Director Sidney Lumet rises vigorously to the dread occasion. Item: the large animated map, on which enormous aerial battles are imagined in diagram and followed as they flow, is a magnificent narrative conceit. But during the last half of the film the illusion of reality slowly collapses into a steaming mess of socio-political platitudes (“In a nuclear war, everybody loses”). If Dr. Strangelove, as some think, made a serious subject silly, Fail Safe too often makes a serious subject soggy. The customers begin to yawn and then to smile. Indeed, in the final scene, when the U.S. President drops an H-bomb on New York City in preposterous apology for the H-bomb dropped on Moscow, they may even laugh out loud.

* And no wonder. In its plot, Fail Safe is strangely similar to Peter George’s Red Alert, the 1958 novel on which Dr. Strangelove is based. When Fail-Safe (the book was sold to Hollywood but the hyphen apparently was not) was published in 1962, Novelist George sued Novelists Burdick and Wheeler for plagiarism. They settled out of court for undisclosed considerations. In any case, the issue is now academic; both pictures were produced by the same company (Columbia).