Episode 36: "Fail Safe"

Fail Safe was released in 1964 and profiles a nightmare scenario of an accidental nuclear attack on Moscow. Where Dr. Strangelove is a dark comedy/political satire about a very similar narrative, Fail Safe takes a dramatic look at nuclear cataclysm.

⚠️ Spoilers lie ahead.

Links:

https://tubitv.com/movies/670402/fail-safe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail_Safe_(1964_film)

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Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey. 

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will talk about the film failsafe like Dr Strangelove, which I profiled in an earlier episode. This film was also released in 1964 and it looks at the dark subject matter of exactly how close did America come to nuclear war or nuclear annihilation with Russia during the Cold War, where Dr Strangelove is a dark comedy. Kubrick himself called it his nightmare comedy slash political satire, failsafe takes things in a more dramatic way, in a highly dramatic way. It's tense at times, a bit of a nail biter, and other times, for me, it feels a bit plodding. I felt like it probably could have been about 20 minutes shorter than it was, and it would have still kept the suspense. Nevertheless, some people have called it the most horrific non horror movie ever, or the closest thing to a horror movie that a non horror movie can be. So saddle up, and we will take this ride. A bit of backstory here. There are some obvious similarities, as I mentioned, between failsafe and Dr, Strangelove. Dr, Strangelove, more tongue in cheek, laugh out loud, funny at some points in time. Fail safe much more dramatic. And fail safe was based on a novel of the same name, which was released by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. The novel came out in 1962 and then failsafe was released in 1964 as you may remember, Dr Strangelove was also based very, very loosely on Peter George's novel red alert, and it's basically like what Sam and Kubrick does with Stephen King's The Shining he takes a basic premise, but then he's going to put very, very much his own spin on it. A copyright infringement lawsuit was filed because Stanley Kubrick, who was the screenwriterdirector of Dr Strangelove, and then Peter George, who was the author of the novel Red Alert, felt like failsafe was so similar that it actually could be considered copyright infringement. According to Wikipedia, that case was settled out of court, but as a result, Columbia Pictures, which had financed and was distributing Dr Strangelove, also bought failsafe, which had been an independently financed production, and Stanley Kubrick had said that he wanted to make sure that his movie was released first. So I think that's one reason why, when we think about films of this era that deal specifically with like the Cuban Missile Crisis, and how close did we really get to the world blowing up? In many cases, we think about Dr Strangelove. Failsafe is directed by Sidney lumey, who you may also remember for movies like 12 Angry Men, Dog Day, afternoon network, the verdict, etc. And as I've mentioned, it really takes a different tone. This is not dark comedy. It's much more. I think it tries for a realistic look at what might have been had we really had this terrible accident, the world might really have been in this kind of a cataclysmic, terrible decision that needed to be made. So the film opens up on New York City at 5:30am and we see this weird scene of people watching a bull fight. So we're told that we're in New York City at 5:30am yet people are watching a bullfight. It looks like something that would be happening later in the day in Spain, we discover, however, that this scene was apparently one man's private nightmare. The man is covered in sweat and goes to check on his kids in their bedroom. And he believes that this nightmare is connected to his work. He talks about resigning, but this concerns his wife. She says that she hopes that he'll take the day off, but he must go to an important meeting. So now we flash to Washington, DC, at 5:30am Walter matthau's character is arguing at a party that 60 million people dead should be the highest price that they're willing to pay in a war, another party guest challenges this, especially since the first acceptable number that his character threw out was 100 million dead as an acceptable number, he says, any war, including thermonuclear war, should have a winner and a loser. Excuse me, should have a winner and a loser. One of the. Tells him, in a nuclear war, everyone loses. Walter Matthau s character says that for 1000s of years, wars have wiped out entire peoples. The goal remains, who wins, who loses, and whose culture survives. The man retorts, a culture with most of its people dead and the rest dying in a poisoned environment. Walter Matthau, character we learn is a political scientist, and he says that he would rather that the American culture survives than the Russian culture. Another guest asks him who would actually survive, and he makes the joke that convicts and file clerks would make it they're basically all underground, so they have the strongest ability to survive in a thermonuclear war. And we learn at this point that this man is named Professor groda Shelley. I'm going to butt in here because in RFK Jr's book about the Wuhan cover up, he mentions that this character is based on the real Dr Strangelove named Herman Kahn. So I'll hop over to Wikipedia for a moment, to Herman Kahn's Wikipedia page. Herman Kahn was an American physicist and founding member of the Hudson Institute, regarded as one of the preeminent futurists of the latter part of the 20th century. He originally came to prominence as a military strategist and systems theorist while employed at the RAND Corporation, he analyzed the likely consequences of nuclear war and recommended ways to improve survivability during the Cold War. Kahn posited the idea of a winnable nuclear exchange in his 1960 book on thermonuclear war, for which he was one of the historical inspirations for the title character of Stanley Kubrick's classic black comedy film satire. Dr Strangelove, in his commentary for failsafe, Director, Sidney lumey, remarked that Professor groda Shelley's character is also based on Herman Cahn Conn's theories contributed to the development of the nuclear strategy of the United States. End quote. So there's some more horrific things to think about, just this backroom, War Room strategizing of if we were to do this, what's the acceptable number of dead people? At what point would we say that we won, as long as we have some amount of population left, even if the Earth is poison, as long as we're declared the winner, at what point does that become? Quote, okay, so frightening to think about. So grota Shelley leaves this party and is breaking up at like 530 in the morning, which is weird. Apparently they've had a dinner party that went all night long, and now at breakfast time, they're finally breaking the party up. He finds this woman from the party in his car, and she asks him to drive her home. She says that he jokes around about convicts and file clerks because he knows there actually would not be any survivors at all. He admits that there wouldn't be many survivors. And she again, says, I don't think there would be any survivors at all. She says that he makes death into a gain. They have a rather bizarre seduction scene where she seems to get off on the idea of suicide commingled with mass murder, but then he slaps her and says that he isn't her kind. This is a very weird dinner party slash seduction scene that we have going on here. So now we go over to Omaha, Nebraska at 5:30am an official named Colonel Cassio at the Offutt Air Force Base gets an urgent message. He leaves to have an argument with his drunken father and his boss, general Bogan, goes to the apartment to find him. So we know now that it must be very important. Bogan senses the awkwardness of the situation and tells Cassio that they have a group of VIPs to escort. They have to meet with a congressman and an equipment manufacturer that are coming there to visit them at Offutt. So now we go over to Anchorage, Alaska at 5:30am we see a group of soldiers playing pool and table tennis back at Omaha, the congressman and the manufacturer are given a tour of the nerve center and told about various planes equipped with air to air missiles. The Congressman admits that all of their surveillance capabilities make him nervous. He worries that the technology might take over and make things worse, create problems rather than solve them. The Congressman worries that no one is fully informed or responsible. Which reminds me, this is my personal note here. Reminds me of Mr. X from Oliver Stone's film JFK, because, you know, there's that scene where Mr. X is telling Jim Garrison's character. There's been no vote. Nothing's on paper. No one's to blame. So the Congressman, I think, has a valid point here. Nobody's fully informed or responsible if something goes wrong while they're there, the radar detects a UFO near Hudson's Bay. It's regarded as hot. Style, until proven otherwise, the bombers will fly to their fail safe points and wait until they get an order to enter the Soviet Union. Only the President of the United States can give an order of attack through the plane's failsafe boxes. We go now to the meeting where grota Shelley is speaking because he's gone to like, a meeting at the Pentagon or someplace where they're doing these war games, future strategies, etc. So he actually brings up biological warfare, and he brings up various scenarios about only striking missile bases and how war could be limited. A man named General black, and we discovered that general black is the same person that we saw earlier in New York City having the weird nightmare about the bullfight. He speaks of how the military really doesn't solely carry out policy. It also makes policy. He says there's no longer such a thing as limited war, not with modern weapons of mass destruction. Groda Shelley asks if he's advocating for disarmament, because that's the only logical conclusion based on this train of thought. And in my personal notes I've written, I thought of JFK, because this is a very similar scene to what played out, really, in the halls of power during that time. Well, if you just keep trying to get a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. If you try to make peace, then you're basically surrendering. We're going to wind up going to war because you want to be too much of a peacemaker. You're giving too much over to the Soviets. They're going to pull a fast one. They're going to pretend that they're negotiating. They're going to pretend that they're friendly to all of this, and then they're going to stab us in the back. So general Black says that grota Shelley's line of thought is that the world will be blown up. It's inevitable. So it's like you have grota Shelley saying, Well, if we try, if your your line of thought that these weapons of mass destruction will inevitably lead to the world collapsing, all of us dying in nuclear annihilation, if not on purpose, than on accident, and then grow to Shelley's retort is that it's like, it's like a Nazi way of thinking, honestly, because he says that you're, you're assuming that the Russians are rational. All right, so general, Black says that grota Shelley's line of thought is that the world will be blown up, and it's inevitable. He says that we're setting up a war machine that acts faster than the ability of men to control it. Grota, Shelley says that assumptions about mutually assured destruction assume that the Russians are rational and that no accidents would ever happen. He uses the UFO as an example of what if this is a Russian missile, even if an accident happens, wouldn't we still have to hit them with all we've got. So groda Shelley is kind of like the Russians have their Marxist way of thinking. They're not rational, they're not like normal, empathetic human beings. So you can see this Nazi esque way of thinking. Well, they're not human, they're not normal, so whatever we do to them is kind of okay. It's within the rules of the game. And even if an accident happens, even if they launch something at us by accident, wouldn't we still have to hit them with both barrels and just annihilate their whole country. At offit, the situation is sounding more dire. The nerve center gets noisy and tensions grow. However, we learn that the UFO is a commercial flight in distress, and it is not a Russian missile. The failsafe pilots are waiting for their orders at Offutt, something in the control panel goes wrong, and the failsafe planes like the their box starts to beep and blink, and they try to call off it to figure out, Is this serious? Is it not? But they can't get through so they take out a set of top secret papers and discover that the code flashing on the failsafe box is valid. So in other words, the code that's flashing on the box matches the one that they have in their top secret paperwork to tell them this is a valid attack their target is Moscow. Meanwhile, at Offutt, everything's fine, and people are laughing, but they catch on the radar that the failsafe planes are still in attack position, and they begin to get quite worried. At the meeting with groda Shelley, the military brass noticed the same thing. They too are starting to wonder what's going on next. We see Larry hagmans character Buck going to the White House as a Russian translator, and he is obviously nervous. We also finally see Henry Fonda, who is playing the president. He's aware that these planes are en route to Moscow and an intervention is needed, he tells the translator that he is there in case a private call to the Kremlin is needed. Another plane would be needed to run a diversion. If that doesn't work, then the President will have to order the planes shot down to avoid a nuclear strike on Moscow. They debate whether or not. Want to shoot the planes down kill the soldiers. The general consensus is that the planes will have to be shot down. The President gives the Go ahead, even though he does not want to next. They strategize what will happen if the planes can't be shot down? How will the Russians react? In my personal notes, I've written, there's a scene reminiscent of how in 2001 A Space Odyssey, because we're told that the machines work so much faster than the humans do, like they're all of these protocols put in to override possible interference. But like with Hal, we're told that he's perfect. He doesn't make a mistake. The human beings around him might make mistakes, but he doesn't because he's been engineered to be perfect. Then there's also the question of, is this some trick by the Soviets? Grota Shelley tells everyone that the Soviets are just machines. They don't have normal human emotions. So here again, we go back to a Nazi esque line of thinking. They're not real humans. They don't have normal human emotions, and he suggests doing nothing. His attitude, more or less, is, fuck it. Let's just bomb Moscow and let the Russians surrender. He actually says, This is our chance. The first move has been made for us on accident. Let's take advantage of it. I'm going to butt in again and say I'm fairly sure that this never let a good crisis go to waste. Mentality is something that the fat cats use repetitively in their strategizing. If they have an opportunity to grab more power, to grab more money, they're going to take it. So the attempts to bring the planes down fail. There are men at the Pentagon predicting that one or two of these bomber planes will still get through Larry hagman's character, buck is told that he will have to translate a call to the Kremlin. Obviously, the Soviet Premier is upset. The President encourages the Soviets to shoot down the remaining rogue plane, but don't do anything further, don't use this as an excuse to start world war three. One of the remaining fail safe rogue planes was shot down, but there's at least one other one that remains. The President asks if the mechanical failure at Offutt Air Force Base was the result of communication jamming by the Soviets. The Soviet Premier admits that it was a jamming by them and that he didn't even know that it was happening. I've written in my personal notes that this also mirrors the JFK Khrushchev situation, because you have two presidents, both of whom had seen real warfare and wanted to not duplicate that, if at all possible, but the war hawks around them and both of their administrations were thirsty for it. So it's like you have the Soviet Premier saying, yes, it was a jamming by us, but I didn't even know that that was happening. My My military industrial complex did it without my knowing about it. The President is finally able to make contact with one of the failsafe planes, but the pilot ignores him, and it is suggested that the Russian premier get out of Moscow for his own safety. So at this point in the film, two of the six planes have been destroyed. Grota Shelley still pushes for an attack finish what we've started. He says it's murder in order to keep from being murdered, and he pushes an agenda of survival of the fittest. The president talks to general black, who's there at that Pentagon meeting, and alludes to New York City and the sacrifice of Abraham and Isaac in the Bible, so you can already start to see this foreshadowing of a very, very dark, disturbing plan. The President orders the military personnel to cooperate with the Soviets to help shoot down the remaining fail safe planes. Some of the men at Offutt do not want to cooperate. Cassio has a nervous breakdown. One man cooperates under severe orders and severe duress, and the Soviets now know how to destroy American air to air missiles. Casso regains his composure, and he believes that it is all a Soviet trap. This is all an elaborate ruse by the USSR to extract our secrets and launch their own attack against the US. Cassio hits Bogan to knock him out. He tries to gain control of the nerve center there at Offutt but is hauled off by military police and he yells that Bogan is a traitor. Bogan is not terribly angry, since he thinks anyone could have cracked under the strain. The president says that when the bomb hits Moscow, he will bomb New York City and use the Empire State Building for ground zero. His hope is that Russia won't feel the need to attack the US. If he does this, sort of like a weird, perverted Olive Branch, we'll show you that it was all a mistake by bombing ourselves. Bogan gets angry because the Soviets. Down a defensive plane that didn't have any bombs. And this basically guarantees that the plane with the bombs will make it to Moscow. The President has the idea to get the pilot's wife to speak to him and convince him not to bomb Moscow. He does not listen to her. I've written in my personal notes that that reminds me of the character King Kong in Dr, Strangelove. You know, Slim Pickens rides the bomb down. It's like, even though the plane is flying low and they barely have any altitude, he's like, damn it, we've come this far. We're gonna bomb somebody, and the pilot in this failsafe is that way too. Like, no, I'm on a mission. This has become all I can think about. We're gonna, we're going to go. We're doing it at the Pentagon. They are asking if there are any essential documents in New York City that need to be saved. The answer is no. We do learn, however, that the First Lady is there on a visit. Grota Shelley estimates that 3 million people will die immediately, and then probably another one or 2 million will die later, from the radiation, as well as from getting buried under rubble, not being found, etc. He says, we will need to rescue important corporate documents from New York City because they are vital to the economy. I also want to point out, don't you think that this is the kind of war gaming that goes on? We need to make sure that we rescue important corporate documents because they're vital to the economy. Fuck the people that are dead, the people that are laying in rubble, the people that will die later from radiation poisoning, forget about them. They're a lost cause anyway. But damn it, we need to make sure that we do search and rescue for important corporate documents. The President tries to make small talk with buck the translator about the weather, and it just strikes me as being so incredibly tacky. In the middle of what's happening, there's a heated exchange between the President and the Soviet Premier, and we hear the sound of the bomb hitting Moscow, and the ambassador to Moscow dies, like they say in the movie, we'll know that that it's hit when we hear the squeal of the phone lines dying, and you hear that on the on the movie. So the President contacts general black and gives him the go ahead to bomb New York City. And we see images of normal New York city life, people totally unaware of what's coming. General black remembers his nightmare about the bullfight that he had that morning, and he actually commits suicide by taking a poison, like a vial of poison that he had hidden in his flight suit. And then the film ends with freeze frames of people right as the bomb detonates. It's like kids are playing out in the street, and other people are going to college classes, going to work, just doing normal, everyday tasks, when suddenly the bomb detonates, and we're left with these horrifying images at the very end of the film. On the film's Wikipedia page, we read when failsafe opened in October 1964 it garnered excellent reviews, but its box office performance was poor. Its failure rested with the similarity between it and the nuclear war satire Dr Strangelove, which had appeared in theaters first in january 1964 still the film later was applauded as a cold war thriller. The novel sold through to the 1980s and 1990s and the film was given high marks for retaining the essence of the novel over the years, both the novel and the movie were well received for their depiction of a nuclear crisis, despite many critical reviews rejecting the notion that a breakdown in communication could result in the erroneous GO, GO command depicted in the novel and the movie. End quote, yeah, I don't know about that. I tend to think that, well, at any point in time, human error or machine error could occur. And it's even now, even though we're not in the I mean, we kind of are, because there's all of this sort of New Vogue cold war going on between the US and Russia, but and by the time this episode hits the airwaves, only God knows what will be going on with that. But I even now, it's terrifying to think about. The idea of all it would take would be one rogue person, or all it would take would be some sort of equipment failure, and we could be tossed into some dire situation like that. In watching it in modern times, it did strike me as feeling like a propaganda film, even though you could argue that it was an anti war, anti nuclear, arms race, type of propaganda film, the tension, I don't know. There was just something about it in my mind that I felt like I was watching a propaganda film, like a scare tactic film, even if it capitalized on a very valid fear. I think for me, as someone born toward the end of Gen X, I just kept thinking, This feels like a propaganda film. It feels like something that is deliberately meant to scare the shit out of people, and maybe that fear was rightfully placed. I. Brought back to Francis Richard Connelly's film, everything is a rich man's trick, which I need to sit down and record a review about that maybe more than one episode, because it's lengthy and he gets into a wide variety of topics, not the least of which is, there is a conspiracy that the Cold War itself was a sham that really needs to be its own episode. Was the Cold War just an orchestrated Sham. And one of the arguments there is about this notion of Mutually Assured Destruction. You have this arms race, you have two quote, unquote, superpowers that have more or less, I mean, we can split hairs on this, but more or less the same type of Arsenal, enough weaponry to blow the world up multiple times over. You have to know that if you do it to the other guy, he's going to do it to you. Probably worse, nobody's going to be left. Your society is going to be in ruins. As Khrushchev said, the living would envy the dead. So what's the point? Other than making the military industrial complex and the defense contractors rich and then making the intelligence and the spy apparatus humongous in the absence of those things, what's the freaking point? Then you also get the public into a state of panic. You raise this rah, rah, jingoistic flag waving ethos in the country, because you have a boogeyman. You have us versus them. Our way is superior. They are inferior, like grota Shelley talks about in this film failsafe, well, it's like they're not even human. They don't have normal human emotions. They don't have normal human rationality. So if we bomb them, I mean, are we really wrong for it probably not this creepy, Nazi esque way of thinking. So I think those are interesting questions, and I plan to do some episodes around those topics. Is it possible that the Cold War was just like one giant psyop and these propaganda films of like, holy shit you guys. You don't know how close we came. Could that all just be phony baloney? I feel like that's a question we're not supposed to ask. Therefore, I want to ask it, but I will do that in a future episode. I was able to see failsafe free of charge on Tubi. My standard disclaimer here, I don't control what's available on Tubi. Sometimes movies and TV shows come and go off of there. Something might be here for a couple of months and then gone for a couple of months. If you need to spend a couple of bucks to check it out. I think it's worth it's worth that. It's It's um, for me, slow and plotting in a few places. But overall, I think of film worth watching, especially to think about what was going on in the minds of people at that point in time, but also to think about what these fat cats and power brokers do now when they go off and they have their little meetings about how they're going to control the world, looking in the direction of Davos, for example, you have to know They're doing these types of war games. Well, if we lost X number million of people, wouldn't it still be worth it? Creepy, creepy stuff. Stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode. 

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