”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

Empty Vessel, Most Noise.

He went from being a radio personality to a TV superstar, with his hate-speak and political lies, ultimately driving the course of political movements with his disinformation, empty rhetoric, and outright falsehoods, until he was brought down when his redneck public discerned his ultimate snake-oil shallowness. If you think I’m talking about Glenn Beck, I am. It’s also the story of Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes in A FACE IN THE CROWD.

Political monolith Keith Olbermann piqued my interest in this movie by constantly referring to asinine political commentator Glenn Beck as Lonesome Rhodes Beck. Olbermann would occasionally cite the movie from whence he drew the analogy.

In this 1957 film, written presciently by Bud Schulberg and directed kinetically by Elia Kazan, Andy Griffith is Larry Rhodes – a Brando-esque titan from his first seconds onscreen. You heard me: this is not the Andy Griffith from Mayberry NC whom everybody loves for his suffocating kindness and goodness. Rhodes is a rough-hewn black diamond that Griffith carved from battery acid and demon seed long before Opie and Barney and Aunt Bee turned him into, well, Andy Griffith.

Rhodes is discovered sleeping it off in a small-town jailhouse by Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), searching for a human interest story for her radio show. (This was back when a good-looking woman with cheekbones like Optimus Prime and a waist the size of a wrist could roam amongst the perps in a jail cell with no fear of being ass-raped. Maybe in Mayberry…) Marcia is so taken with the self-aggrandizing, lusty redneck drifter Rhodes, she commissions him for her radio show, “A Face In The Crowd,” letting him be as loudmouth, ribald, passionate and charming as all get-out. And the ratings create a monster…

At first it’s all catchy songs and down-home stories. Rhodes: “I put my whole self into everything I do!” His rise to fame is meteoric: a ship is named after him, a mountain, awards, until he’s bigger than the Beatles who were bigger than Jesus. After he starts believing his own myth, he starts exploiting his power: “I’m not just an entertainer – I’m an influence, a wielder of opinions, a force!”… “My flock of sheep, rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, housefraus, shutins, pea-pickers; everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle – they’re even more stupid than I am, so I got a thing for ’em…” Lonesome’s hubris, coupled with his inborn ignorance, would be his downfall. See Glenn Beck.

Walter Matthau is newspaperman Mel, a conscience whom Marcia desperately needs when her reality slips under the cogs of Lonesome. Lee Remick, her eyes like diamonds aglow, is the most beautiful girl in the world at this point in time, and a teen fling for Lonesome.

Was director Kazan the man responsible for bringing out such feral energy in Griffith, as he did with Brando in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951) and ON THE WATERFRONT (1954), and as he did with James Dean in EAST OF EDEN (1955)? He makes Griffith’s Lonesome a despicable character; we never take to him as a once-innocent soul now corrupted – we can smell the shit he’s shoveling from his first seconds onscreen. (And he even gets his “Stella!” moment, crying “Marsha! Marsha!” from the top of the stairs rather than the bottom, and in a very different context than Brando.)

In this parable that presages NETWORK (1976) by two decades, they speak of politics becoming entertainment, we see the pitfalls of demagoguery, and Republicans still trying to cut social security and unemployment benefits! It is disturbing to see the venality in marketing that we thought only arrived with modern capitalism: boosting sales of the placebo Vitajex by changing its color from white to yellow (“the color of sunshine”). And we shudder at the oligarchic politicians supposedly in a democracy, who buy Lonesome for a dollar and a compliment: “Television is a wielder of opinion, an institution positively sacred to this country, like the Washington Monument… Every strong, healthy society from the Egyptians on, the mass had to be guided with a strong hand by a responsible elite. In TV, we have the greatest instrument of mass persuasion in the history of the world!”

Holding up across time, this movie even captures that “modern” tripup of dignitaries and trashy celebs alike – the “off-mic” moment: when public personas think they are “off microphone” but somewhere, a mic is picking up their every word and – more damningly – their contempt for their audience. (Obama’s “I’ll have more leverage in my second term” that revealed the man had hubris after all; Romney’s “47% of Americans are freeloaders” that lost him a presidency.)

The film is also intrinsically racist in all those subtle ways that we forget are racism for their accepted ubiquity: The owner of a radio station has a black man polishing his shoes near his desk as he listens to Lonesome; owner scruffs the black man’s hair, “You like him?” “Yessuh ah do!” Look at the dominant-subjugated positioning of these two; look at the infantilizing attitude of the white guy. That black guy might as well be a slave – he might actually BE a slave! In real life!

Matthau gives a prescient eulogy of Lonesome’s career, that describes the arc of most ideologues; it is not black and white, not winning or losing outright, but a slow death over a spit, “You’ll be back with a show -probably not top 5 or 10 – some people will remember, some won’t…”

A FACE IN THE CROWD is indeed prophetic, as it portrays Lonesome’s popularity decline exactly as his real life avatar’s popularity declined. Thankfully, like Lonesome Rhodes, Glenn Beck would become just another face in the crowd.

END

Conspiracy Clearly.

To sin by silence when we should protest, makes cowards out of men.
–Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

When it comes to 9-11, or John F. Kennedy, or Jesus Christ, no one cares what you think. They know what they know. And no one’s gonna tell ’em otherwise.

Oliver Stone doesn’t care what you think. He directs JFK with the hand of a gunslinger and the eye of a croupier. And you can either accept the fact this truth-seeking movie exists (note I said truth-“seeking” not truth-“ful”), or whine like a petty hyena nibbling around the kill of a feasting lion, because it’s not what you were told to think.

JFK details the deep background behind the assassination of American president John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963, using the Abraham Zapruder film as a starting point. It doesn’t seek to “prove” anything insomuch as “disprove” the Lee Harvey Oswald Lone Gunman Theory. Again, if you are one of the close-minded who wish to accept the bent Warren Commission Report as the “official” truth, keep believing in altruistic government. But even the United States Congress officially admitted there was a “probable conspiracy” surrounding Kennedy’s suspicious murder. A title card tells us a congressional investigation of 1976-79 “recommended the Justice Department investigate further. As of 1991, the department has done nothing. And the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations are locked away until the year 2029.”

JFK will boil your blood either way. If you believe Oswald killed Kennedy, then this movie will boil your blood because it focuses on a conspiracy that you believe doesn’t exist; if you believe there was/is a conspiracy and coverup, it will boil your blood because the narrative of “Oswald killed Kennedy” still prevails in American culture, and the conspirators are still not revealed or brought to justice.

A mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma.
–Joe Pesci as David Ferrie, JFK.

Kevin Costner stars as U.S. attorney Jim Garrison (whose 1988 book On the Trail of the Assassins inspired the movie, along with the book by Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy). Though many people at the time smelled something fishy in the whole operation – not least, the many witnesses in Dealey Plaza whom Garrison interviewed, whose reports differed wildly from the “official” Warren Commission ketchup – Garrison was in a position to do something about it. In an unforeseen irony, by putting the murdered Lee Harvey Oswald under the microscope, studying his character, affiliations, marksmanship and politics, his whereabouts and movements, Garrison and his team discover that Oswald couldn’t possibly have been the lone shooter, let alone fired three bulls eyes in rapid succession (it became doubtful he had even fired a single shot), and was probably what Oswald himself claimed to be – a patsy.

“Hey you guys, the CIA’s staged assassination of the president is on TV tonight!”

Chameleon Gary Oldman is Lee Harvey Oswald, here portrayed as a rudderless communist agitator. Everyone surrounding these two main players in this drama is a familiar face, a recognizable character actor, if not an A- or B-list star: Jack Lemmon, Ed Asner, Michael Rooker, Vincent D’Onofrio, Walter Matthau, Laurie Metcalf, John Candy, Jay O. Sanders, Frank Whaley, Wayne Knight, Kevin Bacon as a rentboy, Sissy Spacek as Garrison’s long-suffering wife, and Brian Doyle-Murray as Jack “Ruby” Rubinstein, Oswald’s killer. (With Oswald’s murder, more questions: Was it a simple revenge killing? Or – before any legal testimony could be coaxed from him – was it a sanction?)

Joe Pesci is David Ferrie, an unbalanced Cuban sympathizer (when is Joe Pesci not unbalanced?), with a wig that just won’t stay straight; Tommy Lee Jones is Clay Shaw, a whacked-out homosexual businessman who, through a circuitous association with Cuban sympathizers, is the only person ever brought to trial for the assassination of Kennedy. A large part of the movie’s dialogue-driven intensity is the Shaw trial, Garrison prosecuting, laying out assassination details step by step. Donald Sutherland makes a covert cameo as a black ops agent who explains the deep background on the government’s and military’s involvement in the assassination, reinforcing our suspicions of the ubiquitous “They.”

As “Mister X,” Sutherland details how events played out that day to a script written by They: Kennedy’s security detail quashed, his motorcade taking an unplanned turn into Dealey Plaza which was not properly secured, the car slowing to 10 mph against protocol, the roof down, the three angles of ambush, his own department sent on a wild goose chase to avoid stepping on the assassination, and so on. In some countries, the “official” versions of the event were made public before they actually happened! A patsy. A setup. A plan falling into place. The lone gunman theory forced into the world media. “They” put forward the Theory and made Oswald fit that theory.

In testimony, Garrison outlines where all the other shots strayed that day, deducing that, “A single bullet now has to account for the remaining seven wounds on Kennedy and Connally [Texas Governor in the front seat of Kennedy’s limo] – but rather than admit to a conspiracy or investigate further, the Warren Commission chose to endorse a theory put forward by an ambitious junior counselor, Arlen Specter; one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people. We’ve come to know it as the Magic Bullet theory.” [Magic Bullet theory: a bullet that turned in midair twice in order to create the entry and exit wounds on the two men.]

Yes, that Arlen Specter (1930-2012). The senator from Pennsylvania. In 1963, he was a Democrat, flipping to Republican in 1965, then flopping back to Democrat in 2009 (because he knew he couldn’t win reelection as a Republican – how’s that for snide, hubristic and arrogant?). Just as Garrison used diagrams and real people to illustrate the path of the “Magic Bullet,” Specter made people sit in various positions to illustrate how one bullet might have somehow done all that damage. Specter died just recently (Oct 2012), which means there was a modern politician who knew guarded secrets about the Kennedy assassination. It is obvious to any rational person that the Magic Bullet theory is a grand illusion, meaning Specter himself knew this, meaning he knew the morbid truth behind the assassination. Did no one think to beat the shit out of this guy to get some answers?

The term “conspiracy theory” has developed into a negative-baggage hammer against anyone who contests the milky, full-of-holes “official” version. (Like the term “grassy knoll” has entered the vernacular as a gag, cited in relation to something not quite kosher.) In the end, the lone gunman has become its own conspiracy theory, because those who endorse it also believe there is an organized group of contras trying to disabuse them of their “faith” in it. But consider these Conspiracy Facts:

“They” ordered the limo full of blood to be cleaned and reconstructed; They ordered the attending doctors not to report correctly on their examinations of Kennedy’s wounds; They superseded all the surgeons’ protocols with military procedures, They spirited away Kennedy’s body before an independent autopsy. Testimony of witnesses was either ignored, edited or destroyed – provided the witnesses themselves did not mysteriously die; arrest records of all the vagrants in the area directly after the shooting went missing… and on it goes. No truth anywhere. None.

Who are “They”? Because there are no answers, everyone is implicated – from the CIA to the FBI, from Cuban sympathizers to the American military and the White House.

During this trial, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. Then Bobby Kennedy. Imagine the tenor of the times – the world was coming apart at the seams. The killers of both men would be claimed as scapegoats to conspiracies, which the film never pursues. It’s too big. Too big to nail. How deep does it all go? We’ll never know. Garrison would later ask his jury, “How many more political murders disguised as suicides, overdose, heart attacks, car crashes….?”

The Zapruder film is its own character here. In essence, JFK is a film made about that film. If it didn’t exist, the Kennedy Assassination would have been an entirely clean sanction.

In carefully staged match-cuts, Stone expands the original grainy footage to take in many angles to give us a more complete perception of the tableau: in Zapruder footage, we see a little girl skipping along next to Kennedy’s limo – cut to closeup of the little girl (Stone’s footage); in Zapruder long shot, a woman waves frantically near the president’s limo – cut to closeup of the woman (Stone’s footage), and so on. It is the most intimate we’ve ever experienced Zapruder, and thus the most disturbing: to see either side of that moment when a human possessed Life and then did not. One minute, he is smiles, expectancy, plans, aches, anxieties, breeze in the hair, memories – the next, Life is gone. Zooming into blurred closeup, we see skull shattering, the infamous “red mist” spoken of by bloodthirsty American sharpshooters, a flap of red skin flying off the head, yet still connected by tissue, the body moving in concert with bullet impacts – sideways, downwards, and then “back and to the left.”

Back and to the left.

Garrison belabors this point for his jury: Back and to the left. Physics. Action-Reaction. When bullets come from different directions, a body will move in reaction to physics laws. Garrison reasons that if there was more than one bullet – and every frame of Zapruder film and resultant reaction points to more than one shooter – then it must by definition be called a conspiracy. That’s all that conspiracy means – more than one person involved.

As his closing argument, and closing the movie, Garrison gives a thunderous Movie Speech; he cajoles, he weeps, he NETWORK‘s, he BRAVEHEART‘s, he Sermon-On-The-Mount‘s… and then does a throwback to the 1950’s “moral tale” movies (when mankind was “tampering in God’s domain”) – he looks directly into the camera and says, “It’s up to you.” The American people. “Do not forget your dying king; show the world this is still a government of the people, for the people, and by the people…” Of course, it falls on the renowned deaf ears of the American people. Garrison, to this date, is the only person to hold a trial in relation to Kennedy’s murder. Clay Shaw was acquitted. It was later revealed he was ex-CIA…

The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.
–attributed to Joseph Goebbels.

Whodunnit? We’ll probably never know. The fact is – it was done. And more than one person was involved. And for that to happen at such a national level, and for the coverup to be so extensive, those involved had to be in positions of unimpeachable authority. Jesus Christ, John F. Kennedy, 9-11. You believe what you want to believe. Next you’ll be telling us the Earth is flat…

END