”Hello, prop department? Could you remove this I DREAM OF JEANNIE background? Larry’s losing focus again.”

Failing at Safe.

Bombing Moscow: the dream of every American chickenhawk politician during the Cold War. Bombing New York: the dream of every other country. In FAIL-SAFE, a grim parable about a war triggered due to a computer glitch, everyone’s dreams come true.

Released in September 1964, only a few months after Stanley Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE (Jan 1964), Sidney Lumet‘s FAIL-SAFE would quite understandably be accused of plagiarizing that movie’s plot (of an international war crisis set in motion by deploying bombers and being unable to recall them – STRANGELOVE even mentions “fail-safe points”), but these two movies employ very different tones; STRANGELOVE is a satire, with laugh-out-loud moments of insanity, while FAIL-SAFE goes the route of just plain insanity.

The “fail-safe point” refers to the farthest point towards the Soviet Union an American bomber can reach before turning back – unless given a direct order to attack. At Strategic Air Command, General Bogan (Frank Overton) explains proudly to a visiting congressman (Sorrell Booke, so young and skinny, we’d never believe he’d go on to become Boss Hogg) how the computer’s many checks and counter-checks would stop matters getting worse should the fail-safe point be breached. Of course, the irony is that these exact protocols designed to be fail-safe, are the very mechanisms that make matters worse.

The best line in the movie comes after Bogan boasts of the “fail-safe” mechanisms, and Boss Hogg asks, “But who checks the checkers?” and an officer answers, “No one,” while Bogan simultaneously answers, “The president.” After stepping on each other’s lines, the two men exchange a frazzled look, and congressman Hogg knows them Duke boys are up to no good again.

In the war room, bracing, intelligent discussion over the opposing ideologies of war; “true” war – as opposed to “profiteering” war (the Dick Cheney model) – between pacifist General Black (Dan O’Herlihy, who would become the CEO in ROBOCOP) and war theorist Groeteschele (Walter Matthau, playing the George C. Scott role from STRANGELOVE; though the Scott role was comedic, and though Matthau is a renowned comedian, Matthau here is scathing in his academic cynicism). From the novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, both sides of the argument are given equal shrift; the purposes of war, the benefits, death tolls, escalation, ceasing, politics, psychology… And it’s amazing how screenwriter Walter Bernstein captures both sides without a trace of bias; each character committed to their roles to the bitter end, which was coming soon in the form of a computer snafu…

While changing a faulty bulb at HQ, the computer inadvertently sends an authorized order to the bomber squadron Group Six – to breach their fail-safe boundaries and bomb Moscow! And no counter-checks can recall them, due to protocol, i.e. any counter-order is construed as being coerced by the enemy.

Enter President Henry Fonda, with lapdog translator Larry Hagman in tow, so young his nappies were full by the end of this intense dialogue-driven thriller. Fonda has some ‘splainin’ to do, on the phone to the premier of the Soviet Union. He beseeches understanding, forgiveness, and promises to help the Russians shoot down his own American bomber squadron!

Though the computer graphics on the radar screens are rudimentary, they yet convey the helpless horror of watching a computer program spiral out of control. Dragging humans into the terrifying consequences. Action scenes of planes are played as stock footage, in silence. And they rock us as solidly as any Michael Bay swooping pan of Corsairs piloted by teen dreams.

At every stage of the game, Fonda keeps asking, “Is it possible?…Is it possible?” sounding like his stalwart character from 12 ANGRY MEN (which Lumet directed in 1957).

Then Groeteschele realizes America could exploit the error, “Let the Russians think the bombers are going to bomb them – and they’ll surrender.” What happens when the bombs drop? He’s got a theoretical solution to that too, “Then we win.” (This too is exactly what Groeteschele’s analog, George C. Scott, proposes in STRANGELOVE.)

America sends fighter planes to shoot down their own bombers! But the fighters only have limited fuel and expend their payloads while falling one by one into the ocean. The fact that Americans are portrayed as premeditatively sacrificing their own men to destroy their own men is astounding! Something we never see in cinema, and something we’ll never see again, with the Gutless MPAA and the specter of 9-11 et al. At that point, this movie could get no better. And then it does…

The strategy that elevates this movie to classic status, the move by the president of the United States that would never be considered in these modern times, let alone written and performed in an American movie: President Fonda, his gritted teeth biting into his damned soul, promises the Russian premier that if any American planes get through the Russian defense and bomb Moscow, to prove his sincerity, he would order an American bomber to bomb New York!

FAIL-SAFE is terrifying. Because it’s about the modern American administration. Now I’m no 9-11 truther, but bear with me on some wild speculation… and look at the New York attacks on September 11, 2001 through the prism of this movie… something for something… a deal made between leaders that we’ll never know about… a leader deposed… in return for?…

Absolutely compelling to the last frame, FAIL-SAFE will turn all your dreams of a safe and secure country into nightmares.

END

Gregory Peck twirls for his supper, in a revealing white pantsuit.

To Live and Die in Americana.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD opens with a female narrator describing the small town she was raised in, her poetic drawl and the lilt of her language dropping us smack in 1933 Alabammy – “recently told we had nothing to fear but fear itself” – just after the crash heralding the Great Depression; you know, the REAL Depression.

From the 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Harper Lee, this movie, this tale itself, at first seems like a stream of Southern consciousness reminiscence, as we follow 10-year-old Jem (Phillip Alford) and his younger tomboy sister Scout (Mary Badham) on their daily adventures, with big-eared pal, Dill (John Megna). But MOCKINGBIRD is a crafty coming of age tale; what the kids believe to be their comforting haven – the tired town of Maycomb – turns out to have whitey fangs, and the person whom their wayward fantasies paint as a lunatic killer of children – their unseen neighbor, Boo Radley (Robert Duvall) – is ultimately a mundane dark angel.

Lording over the proceedings, Gregory Peck as Jem and Scout’s respectable pater, Atticus Finch – wise lawyer, moral pillar, the father we all wish we had; this legendary role cementing him so powerfully as the subdued, majestic voice of reason, at times it seems like Atticus Finch is doing Gregory Peck.

To the kids, Atticus is an old fogey, too timid to let Jem wield a gun like the other kids, never letting Scout fight at school – until new-found respect dawns in their eyes when Atticus shoots down a rabid dog with one shot, Sheriff Heck extolling him as the “best shot in the county”; until Atticus represents a black man in court, the black community standing silently, poignantly, in respect for him, “Stand up, Scout. Your daddy is passing.”

The title is a metaphor for the main plot. Atticus tells his kids of the sin of killing a mockingbird. “They don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.” A person who would kill a mockingbird must be a special kind of crazy. Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), the black man whom Atticus defends, is accused of raping a white woman, and after all evidence points to the woman’s father beating her, after Atticus gives a racism speech that would make Obama proud – yet Tom is convicted. “And the all-white jury agreed.” Before Atticus can request an appeal, Tom is killed for trying to escape.

Jem and Scout sit through the whole trial, their respect for their father growing as large as their disillusionment with the justice system.

In what seems like a coda to the movie, Boo Radley’s identity is revealed, robbing the kids of the last of their illusions. The child actors are magnificent, even outpacing the great Duvall in his first film role playing nothing more than a gentle, enigmatic mute.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is vibrant with the spirit of America – everything that made America – the intolerance and the acceptance, the killing of innocence and the crushing of human spirit; the poverty and the small towns from whence that poverty emanated; and the children who would grow up with injustice and one day work to thwart it.

END