Fail Safe is Much More Than a Worse Dr. Strangelove. It’s a Horror Movie Classic.
Twin films fascinate me. Two films with strikingly similar plots released at more or less the same time. You’d think — given the amount of money and time that go in to making major motion pictures — that studios would try to avoid such an occurrence, but nope; through the decades, there have been literally hundreds of twin films.
One of the earliest — and for my money, most fascinating — pair of twin films occurred in the 1960s, at the apex of nuclear paranoia: Sydney Lumet’s near-forgotten drama, Fail Safe, and Stanley Kubrick’s legendary satire, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (henceforth called Dr. Strangelove in the name of wrist conservation.)
The reasons for my fascination with these two films in particular are not just thier surface similarities — two dialogue-heavy, nearly self-contained pictures about the coordinated responses to accidental nuclear strikes — but the fact that depsite this, the film’s directors struck such different tones. And of course there’s also the fact that Dr. Strangelove has been beloved for generations, while Fail Safe is largely forgotten. Fail Safe exists now mostly as an addendum to discourse about Dr. Strangelove. Lumet’s movie is the Rolling Stones to Dr. Strangelove’s Beatles: A career retrospective about the latter could suffice without mentions of the former; the reverse is impossible.
But fuck The Beatles; I’m a Stones guy. So let’s make the case for Fail Safe.
Fail Safe lost the battle to Dr. Strangelove, for sure, but the first thing we need to keep in mind is that this is one that Fail Safe was never going to win. While most twin films exist in a sort of awkward harmony, the producers of Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove very much did not appreciate the other’s existence. Fail Safe enraged Kubrick. The director, along with Peter George — author of Red Alert, the book on which Dr. Strangelove was based — even sued the producers of Fail Safe on grounds that the source material was so similar it amounted to copyright infringement. Kubrick also leveraged his considerable clout — though he hadn’t perhaps yet become America’s most esteemed director, he was already a big deal by 1964, as evidenced by the box office successes of Spartacus and Lolita — to force the studio to release Dr. Strangelove first, which it did in January.
And worst of all, Kurbick had the audacity to make Dr. Strangelove one of the greatest American movies all time, a satire so instantly iconic that it momentarily reshaped how we discussed nuclear war on film. When Fail Safe released in the fall, it bombed, in part because audiences were primed in the aftermath of Dr. Strangelove to laugh at the thought of nuclear destruction and weren’t in the mood for the stone-cold serious tone Fail Safe was striking. It’s purported that even the film’s star, American movie icon Henry Fonda, said he would never have made Fail Safe if he had seen Dr. Strangelove first, because he too would have laughed.
In a one-on-one critical analysis of the two films, Fail Safe struggles as well. Kubrick’s film is just so much more dynamic; if Fail Safe’s cramped, claustrophobic settings both belie its global themes and considerably ramp up the tension, they also result in the movie feeling for long stretches like a stage play. (Indeed, in 2000, the movie was adapted into a play, more or less unchanged, and aired live on CBS. It’s odd, but check out that cast!) Dr. Strangelove, on the other hand, is full of diverse shots and explosive set pieces. It’s a dark comedy and a proper action war epic. Dr. Strangelove feels more like a real movie, in other words.
Though the acting is excellent in both films — with Fonda’s assured yet increasingly harried performance anchoring Fail Safe — this category also goes to Dr. Strangelove in a landslide. Fail Safe’s uniformly good performances have nothing on Dr. Strangelove’s transcendent ones. George C. Scott is mesmerizing, full of bluster, maniacally chewing gum, sleeping with his secretary. And of course there’s the astonishing Peter Sellers. One gets the sense watching Sellers in Strangelove that no one else on earth could have done what he did. I was reminded of Christoph Waltz’s performance in Inglorious Bastards, not so much in tone, but in sheer, ostentatious difficulty. Quentin Tarantino famously said that he would have abandoned Bastards had he not found Waltz to play Hans Landa. So too is it with this movie: It’s hard to imagine the film even existing, let alone being any good, without Peter Sellers.
I know, I know; I said I’d be making the case for Fail Safe. So let’s get to it. The movie has one irrefutable thing over Dr. Strangelove, and it makes all the difference: Fail Safe is absolutely terrifying.
While Kubrick stared into our nuclear apocalypse and laughed at its absurdity, Lumet saw it for what it was truly was: The saddest, scariest thing in the world. With Fail Safe, he didn’t make a parable or a political thriller or a black comedy; he made a fucking horror movie.
Indeed, it would be difficult to take stock of your mental state at the completion of Fail Safe and classify the film as anything other than horror. It will ravage you. Dr. Strangelove inspires one on reflection to consider perhaps the absurdity of nuclear war, the inefficacy of man and machine, or simply the staggering brilliance of Peter Sellers. Fail Safe makes you want to fucking die. If you want a visceral movie experience, one that makes you realize at its culmination that your palms are damp and your breathing stilted, then Fail Safe is the choice for you.
The structure of the movie works to its advantage. It does not take a life-long movie buff to realize on first viewing that the central crisis in Fail Safe will not be averted — the movie’s crushingly caustic tone makes that outcome all but obvious. But a lack of surprise does not suffuse the tension; instead, it’s the realization that we are headed toward something terrible, one that we will bear witness to whether we like it or not, that gives Fail Safe such a dark power.
The staples of any good horror are present here. Sound design? Christ — I know of not one single sound effect in any movie that has made me feel as unwell as the deafening screech on the telephone the moment the bomb is dropped. It’s the audio-equivalent of Annie Wilkes’ hobbling ritual. Lumet also uses a lack of sound masterfully; the long, heavy silences that linger after failed attempts at dissuading the pilots to turn around or in the wake of a chaotic phone call to the Russian ambassadors provide ample room for a viewer’s anxiety to fester.
And Christ, Fail Safe’s ending. Strangelove’s climactic moment features an array of mushroom clouds erupting all over the world. Horrifying, of course, but the widespread usage of such explosions to represent nuclear war has perhaps muted their impact, particularly for a modern audience. We know going into a movie about nuclear war that we are going to see mushroom clouds. Fail Safe, on the other hand, ends on a collage of freeze-framed, slice-of-life images of New York City, a potent reminder, on a very personal level, of what is about to be lost. That the images are matched to the horribly disengaged sound of a countdown makes it all the more scary. It’s terrifying stuff.
Of course, the true horror of Fail Safe comes from not only the central narrative’s plausibility, but in the sobering realization that we could never trust our actual world leaders to act with half the clarity and composure of these characters in real life. (Trying to imagine a certain former American President in Henry Fonda’s position — which is nigh impossible to avoid doing, I might add — makes one long for the Apocalypse. But I digress.) Not only do the events in Fail Safe seem like they could happen, we can barely even trust that we’d handle it as well if they did.
Fail Safe deserves to be seen and celebrated, not just as a curio for Dr. Strangelove fans. At any rate, I have a hard time imagining a viewer liking one and not at the other. (They’re twins after all.) And though Kubrick and Lumet get to the Apocalypse in different ways, they both arrive at the same conclusion: The end of the world is coming, and it will probably be our fault.
