I was born in 1973, with the last cohort of Americans to really feel the Cold War, and to know how chilling it could get; the last cohort to automatically be grateful for the jury-rigged semi-competence and chintzy special effects of Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh, evil and deadly as those particular mofos have been. I was twelve when the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost (free speech) in his country and started to talk seriously about nuclear arms reductions and 3rd-world truces. Gorbachev was, along with Baseball Abstract author Bill James, my first hero. But I was ten when I started caring about science-fiction, and so two of my most formative years were spent absorbing WWIII tales, spy thrillers, and a mid-1980’s wave of successful movies like the Day After (about nuclear armageddon) and Red Dawn (about villanous Russkie paratroopers exploiting gullible American democracy fans and shooting us en masse next to trenches). When Stephen King imagined, in 1979’s the Stand, the outbreak of the most devastating plague ever, he imagined that the U.S. government would divide its energy between asss-coverage, futile attempts at life-saving … and sending boats of plague-carriers over to the U.S.S.R. I read the novel in time to nod and say “of course”, even while being horrified.
My wife Cindy wasn’t born until 1975, and barely remembers any of this – although in order to enjoy such wonderful novels as Philip Slater’s How I Saved the World and Kate Wilhelm’s Welcome, Chaos, she’s permitted me to explain it to her, and she’s had the imagination to understand. Those novels, like the Stand, were built of clearly made-up events. But in 1962, the Cold War generated a real event as scary as anything in books or films.
It was known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, and for thirteen days it seemed likely that President Kennedy would order an attack on Soviet missile bases in Cuba – which everyone knew would lead the Soviets to lob nuclear missiles at the U.S., which would cause the U.S. to lob nuclear missiles back at the U.S.S.R., which would maybe mean the end of civilization. “Everyone knew” means that Kennedy and Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev knew, and they ended up finding a compromise to get us out of it. Then again, generals and politicians in both countries also knew, and most of them were urging full-scale attack. It was basic math: if you struck at the right time, you might only lose 50 million of your own countrymen while killing 150 million of theirs. Somehow, both leaders turned down such an awesome tradeoff.
I always thought the Cuban missile crisis would make a great thriller movie. Instead, it became a Kevin Costner movie, and while Thirteen Days was actually a pleasant surprise, I still left thinking it would make a great thriller someday. What I’ve since realized is that at least two major movies were inspired by the Cuban Missile Crisis way back in 1964. They were not inspired by the headline story, in which an alarmed U.S. government decided whether to launch a nuclear attack on purpose, but by a frighteningly simple incident that most histories have forgotten: the moment, mid-crisis, when an American reconnaisance plane went off course into Russian territory … leaving _lots_ of room for the Soviets to misunderstand.
Of those 1964 movies about off-course American planes prompting nuclear terror, the more famous, by now, is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. That movie is a comedy in which a bomber plane is sent, without presidential orders, by General Jack D. Ripper (get it? Cuz, like, “D.” can be read as “the”? Like the guy with the knife in London? So it’s like a subtle suggestion that people who fight wars are, like, insane? Huh?). He and military leaders named “Bat” Guano and “King” Kong can’t resolve their differences without fisticuffs and have to get reprimanded “No fighting! This is the war room!”. (It’s ironic! Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think? Cuz it’s a room dedicated to another kind of fighting. You see? You see? Aw, you’re no fun.)
The other 1964 movie on the theme was Fail-Safe. Directed by Sidney Lumet, and prominent enough at the time to star Walter Matthau and Henry Fonda, it has faded from popular awareness. I think it is, nonetheless, a great movie, and one which (for me) holds up far better now that the two-superpower death match is over.
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Fail-Safe, like almost any disaster movie, opens (after a stark white-on-black title indicating “New York: 5:30 a.m.”) with the 20 minutes of throat-clearing in which slices of normal, pre-disruption life are shown. They’re not bad, either. Not only do we get a first chance to know some of the movie’s major characters, but we also meet civilians whose actions are quirky and individual enough to imply that if we spent an hour with them, in better times, they might justify a modest indie flick in their own right. (Unless that would cause the scriptwriters to insert extra dream sequences – the bullfighting dream that opens Fail-Safe disappears from the plot almost completely, thank goodness.)
But showing normal life is one of the more pointless thriller customs, in that we in the audience normally frame the movie-watching experience with just that. So it is good news that even in the beginning, Fail-Safe knows its topic. As we’re directed to 5:30 a.m. in Washington, D.C., we are shown the last wee hours of a dinner party somewhere in the cultural elite, where visiting Professor Groeteschele – whose name is pronounced “Gret-ih-shell-eh” or “Great Shelly” by different characters depending how comfortable they’d be with his German name – is holding forth on his favorite topic: the proper fighting of nuclear wars.
Confidently provocative, with Matthau’s most rounded voice and sly expressions, Groeteschele knows what an effect he makes dismissing the difference between 60 million and 100 million deaths. He enjoys how discomfiting his cheery twinkle is when he talks about the end of civilization. The remaining guests listen, and argue, because he’s a passionate expert, in town to consult with the Department of Defense on nuclear strategy; his grasp of facts is as impressive as his manner. But they also listen because he’ll say things like “the people most likely to survive nuclear war would be the most hardened criminals, and the most menial bureacrats”, pointing out that they’d be in the strongest underground bunkers. “The criminals would have strength and ruthlessness, but the clerks would have organizational skills”, he posits, making a game of it; or as Spike and Angel argued about for three hours at the tops of their voices, “If cavemen got into a fight with astronauts, who would win?”
It's a neat touch, I think, that a young woman is waiting outside after the party, asking Professor Groetschele to drive her home and seeming rather turned on by the fun-with-apocalypse chat. The scene plays out revealingly, too. But soon we’re moved to the Pentagon, where a visiting congressman is being shown how the military monitors for threats.
Over in Omaha at the Strategic Air Command, the vast radar screen starts reporting an Unidentified Flying Object heading towards Detroit. But no one should be thinking of spaceships: this happens half-a-dozen times a month. All that’s done, as D.C. and Omaha keep in touch, is that Green Alert is called and the planes are sent towards their “fail-safe” points just beyond the U.S. borders, where they’ll circle until the invading flock of pigeons is I.D.’d safely. Indeed, the planes only _reach_ the fail-safe point one time in twenty, and the congressman’s tour is treated like a normal tour with a pleasant little bonus. (Important note: these figures were accurate. Fail-Safe was a well-researched movie.)
Of course, there’d be no point in making a movie about the 19 times in 20 when the planes turn around in mid-air and return to base. They reach the fail-safe point, and no one knows what the UFO is yet; the alert level is upped one level, and then the UFO disappears from the screen. A bird? A private plane? Clark Kent? A low-flying Soviet bomber? In both Omaha and D.C., the brass debate the odds, and the alert level is upped again to one step below Red. And then a fuse blows on an important switch: this scares no one, and it’s replaced in two minutes. But in the meantime, a bomber pilot and aide in Alaska – Colonel Grady and Radioman Thomas, whom we’ve gotten to know a bit – have been sent a false signal carrying false orders: the war is on, and their six-plane group should head to Moscow to drop twelve 20-megaton bombs.
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Most movies about a U.S.-vs-Russia World War III took, or implied, foreign policy positions. In some, a la Dr. Strangelove, the willingness to use nuclear weapons was proof of insanity; in others, a la Red Dawn, to oppose the Commies on anything less than the strongest terms was proof of wimphood to the point of treason. Fail-Safe’s main point, instead, is about technology, and the ways in which, as systems get more complex, the errors they make become harder to trace, harder to understand, and harder to prevent.
In fact, it anticipates the central argument of Charles Perrow’s groundbreaking 1984 book Normal Accidents: that once the parts of a system become too tightly interactive, and move too quickly, even efforts to make the system safer are just as likely to make it more dangerous. When Capt. Edward A. Murphy declared that “if anything can go wrong, it will”, he was not a pessimist: his very military point was that all possible errors should be guarded against. It was not a bad notion, and the nuclear high priests tried (within limits) to design with Murphy's law in mind. But Fail-Safe is about what happens when even the safety strategies invent possible new errors that no one could think of.
In Perrow’s terms, discussing systems like nuclear weapons, chemical plants, and space missions: “The demands are inconsistent. Because of the complexity, they are best de-centralized”. (As parts of his book showed in sometimes-scary detail, only the people out in the field can react well to surprise.) Yet “because of the tight coupling, they are best centralized”. (Decisions must be made fast, and the actions of an agent in the field could instantly change the entire system in ways that no one is prepared to deal with.) That’s an impossible dilemma – even without an enemy who wants your task to fail.
So it is that a mechanical failure in the U.S. could coincide with intentional Soviet jamming of American signals. So it is that Colonel Grady and Radioman Thomas have been trained, once they reach the edge of Soviet terrority, to ignore all revised orders: the Russians have every motive to imitate the president’s voice, after all. And so it is that one group of pilots, tremendously well-trained to defend themselves, could create brand new headaches for the most powerful men in the world ... and, more than likely, some brand new radioactive craters in Moscow. Followed, say the plans, by more craters elsewhere. Everywhere.
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Fail-Safe has many virtues: its truthfulness, the scariness and importance of its plot, the acting, the grand flickering views of ancient computers. I quite like the complete absence of music: a tenser ambience is created by radar bleeps, plus a few more alarming sounds. My favorite thing about it, though, is its openness to ideas from all sides of the spectrum. Yes, the unnamed President as played by Henry Fonda is surely a Democrat, and surely he’s a man of smarts and goodwill as he strives to prevent a Soviet retaliation. But Fonda and his military allies (especially his old college buddy General Black) are forced to do deeply, deeply uncomfortable things in this crisis, and his opponents are given plenty of screen time to state their case.
The Soviets interfere with our signals and we screw with theirs, so how do we know they didn’t provoke us into making this mistake on purpose? Then again, how do we know that bombing Moscow is such a bad idea? They wouldn’t _really_ fire back and risk blowing up the world, would they? And even if you reject those ideas, the fact remains that if the U.S. has started a war, it’s incredibly dangerous to spend the next hours not trying to win … especially as the alternatives look worse and worse.
Director Lumet does at one point have Fritz Weaver’s paranoid Col. Cascio stage a nervous breakdown. I wish he didn’t: it seems to be a habit of Lumet's, given Ed Cobb’s breakdown in 12 Angry Men, and it’s a lapse in the movie’s fairness. But at least Col. Cascio is immediately defended as “an excellent soldier” by the man he just tried to harm. As for fairness, the other Lumet movie I’ve seen is Network, an also-excellent movie from 1978. It's very fair: the biggest nervous breakdowns were staged by the closest thing that movie had to a hero, and everyone on Network was pretty cracked. As a representation of changing times, that worked; but should we see that as progress?
The most important fact during the Cuban Missile Crisis, it turned out, was that President Kennedy and Premiere Khrushchev were willing to risk their careers and their reputations, and even to risk charges of disloyalty, once the whole world was at stake. (Khrushchev was more so.) We’ve grown cynical since then. By now it even seems hard to remember when a president would cancel plans, work long overtime, and arrange a successful evacuation before a big hurricane hit … though we’d only have to remember Bill Clinton in 1996 and 1998.
I think Fail-Safe has been largely forgotten because it is uncool: it suggests that leaders might treat a world better than quadruply-backed-up machines could. “Uncool”, however, does not mean “false”. Thrillers are supposed to have heroes, whether or not the heroes succeed. Is it so wrong that one be elected?
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