It’s no wonder Lumet makes some of the formal choices he makes here—an absence of music, for example, which makes the entire film not only quiet enough for a guy to hear himself think, but quiet enough to those most panicked, most paranoid thoughts upon him. It’s also no wonder that we get a real voice of anti-reason coursing through the film, a political scientist played by Walter Matthau and unabashedly inspired by the physicist and futurist Herman Kahn, who once asked us to think the unthinkable.
Matthau’s confident but ultimately, in the heat of a real conflict, unpersuasive professor spends most of the film in the Pentagon, among the president’s closest advisers. From the moment we meet him, it is clear this is a bad idea. This is a man who weighs the toll of nuclear war in relative terms. For him, winning means that American civilization will at least have a chance of surviving, even if millions of Americans do not. His ability to neatly parse these things—civilization, citizens—sums him up. And the movie. Somehow, without even showing us the public whose lives are at stake, Lumet forces you to imagine the real, material consequences of what, in Matthau’s mouth, feels like an abstract game of numbers.
That’s what Fail Safe reveals war to be about—even as the people onscreen seem, in the moment of this particular crisis, to be having second thoughts about Matthau’s games. What’s clear early on is that this imminent nuclear holocaust could have been avoided by a political society that knew, and agreed, that nuclear weapons were a zero-sum game. These world powers are overconfident; even more, they’re driven by ideological suspicions that exacerbate the difficulties of establishing any sense of diplomacy or trust.
It’s to the point that the president, the reliable and not-easily ruffled Fonda, finds himself on the phone with the Soviet chairman practically pleading for some sense of mutual trust and allegiance between their warring countries. We never see the chairman. His sentiments are reported to us through Buck, an interpreter played by Larry Hanson whose job—contra the attitude of the know-it-alls prone to abstraction—is to try to understand the chairman as a person. This is Fonda’s request: Don’t only translate his words, translate the man’s feelings. Treat him, in other words, like a man capable of feeling—not like an unbending war machine.
Overconfidence in technology, overconfidence in our own exceptionalism: these are the ills Fail Safe, an imperfect but appealing and urgent movie, diagnoses of the powers that be. That’s a little different than the other cold war classic of 1964, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which—likewise released by Columbia Pictures—is indelibly tied to Fail Safe much for that reason. The films were famously involved in a copyright infringement lawsuit on behalf of Kubrick and Peter George, whose novel Red Alert was the basis for Strangelove. To George, the similarities between his project and Fail Safe couldn’t have been clearer. And, with Kubrick, he got his way; Fail Safe’s release was delayed six months, to October of that year, by which point Strangelove had ostensibly already rendered it moot.
The important footnote here isn’t the lawsuit itself, but the coincidence in which it resulted. October 1964 put Fail Safe squarely in election season; the COVID crisis is also coming during an election year. In ‘64, the choice was between Barry Goldwater—painted, by his opponent, to be a war hawk, and very much on the wrong side of nuclear history as far as both Fail Safe and Strangelove are concerned—and Lyndon B. Johnson. We, too, are at a dire crossroads in a pivotal election—moreso than even last time. Though underseen in its moment, Fail Safe is inextricable from Johnson’s win; in its tragedy, which complements Strangelove’s folly, it made a better case for his election than perhaps the candidate himself did.