Fail-Safe
Set adrift on memory bliss...
[WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE FILM “FAIL-SAFE”]
[MIND YOU, THE FILM WAS RELEASED IN 1963 SO HOW LONG IS A SPOILER STILL A SPOILER?]
[ALSO THERE ARE SPOILERS FOR THE FILM “MANHATTAN” – AS IF EVENTS HAVEN’T ALREADY SPOILED THAT FILM FOREVER]
For years I told my kids how the film that freaked me out as a young person, which gave me actual nightmares, was a thing called Fail-Safe. I mean I truly had nightmares about this film.
Especially the ending. The end of Fail-Safe haunted my dreams and turned them to nightmares.
Apparently.
According to my memories.
But one of the things about memories is how unreliable they can turn out to be. My life is littered with moments I remember vividly which have then, on closer re-examination, proved to be so very different to the way I remembered them. If I was in a court of law, being asked to remember events on the night in question, I fear I would be a much less than reliable star witness.
I blame a hyperactive imagination, leading to an artificially embellished reality.
Or something along those lines.
Anyway, the opportunity for me to revisit my nightmarish childhood arose recently when the wonderful treasure that is the Academy Cinema, buried underneath the Auckland Public Library, screened Fail-Safe, for one night only.
I mentioned this to the whanau and, naturally, they were enthusiastically all-in to check out the film that had terrified me as a young thing.
Tickets were duly booked.
This worried me. The last time we had ventured out, as a family unit, to watch a film that had meant something to me “back when I was your age” had not entirely worked out so good.
As a young man and aspiring comedy writer, I loved the films of Woody Allen. They were smart and they were funny. And they were the sort of films I aspired to make, back when I aspired to make films.
Then the world changed, Woody-wise.
So, when there was a screening of Manhattan, on the big screen, at The Civic, I recounted all the things I loved about that film, as a young, aspiring something.
Tickets were duly booked.
Not long into the screening, with my family around me, I remembered all the things I love about Manhattan. The cinematography. The music. The ode to a remarkable city.
Then the elephant in the room becomes elephantine. In Manhattan Woody Allen is a 42-year-old comedy writer, dating Mariel Hemingway, a 17-year old student.
Is it possible to be creepy by association with a film you quite liked many, many years ago?
There was a loud silence on the way out. Then we talked about how good the cinematography was, to avoid the elephant.
So, I hope you understand my trepidations, as we descended into the filmic dungeon that is the Academy and took our seats with an acceptable number of film nerds to watch the 1963 Sidney Lumet film, Fail-Safe.
And within seconds my fears start to take hold. Not the old fears I apparently had as a kid, but the fears that I have just remembered this film completely wrong. The fact that, like Manhattan, Fail-Safe is in black-and-white just adds fuel to my fears.
The film I remember about being about nuclear destruction opens with a man watching a bull-fight.
I have no memory of there being a bull-fight in the film that allegedly terrified me. Is it possible there is an alternative version of Fail-Safe that I have not seen?
(And not just the 2000 TV movie remake, which I have not seen.)
It turns out that the bull-fight – the matador scene – is a dream sequence.
Here is a picture of me trying to recreate my impression of that scene using a cat when it jumped on me in bed the next day.
The first ten minutes of this watch of Fail-Safe are a blur to me. There is nothing here I remember. Even worse, the film starts to get weird when we go to Walter Matthau, as a character with the remarkably unpronounceable last name of Groteschele, who has apparently been pontificating all night to rich New Yorkers about how nuclear war is a good thing (or something like that), to the point where some dude is shouting at him.
Fair play to the shouting dude, despite the over-acting, but at least I know now that we are watching the same film I once saw, because it is definitely about nuclear war.
But then Walter ends up in a park-up with one of the only three female characters in this film and she is some kind of weird nuclear war groupie until he brings her to her senses by slapping her, in a scene that: (a) I have no recollection of; and (b) makes no sense to me now that I am watching it: and (c) suddenly makes me worried that this is Manhattan all over again.
Luckily, eventually, because this is 1960’s filmmaking and back then they took their sweet time getting to the point, Fail-Safe eventually gets to the point.
[SPOILER ALERT: THIS IS WHERE THE SPOILERS ACTUALLY START. IF YOU THOUGHT ANY OF THE ABOVE WAS A SPOILER, IT REALLY WASN’T]
Fail-Safe is a film about nuclear destruction. It shares a time-frame, and a lot of DNA, with Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. In fact, there were lawsuits about who had the creative rights to the upcoming nuclear Armageddon.
Go Hollywood. Stay classy.
The plot of Fail-Safe is about how, during the coldest days of the Cold War, America would fly bomber groups, armed with nuclear weapons, on an out-and-back pattern, towards the USSR. It was, apparently, fail-safe, that the bombers would reach the out point and would then turn back.
Unless the order to turn back never arrived.
Because this would mean that the USA and the USSR were now at war. And the bombers must proceed to their assigned target.
In the film, Fail-Safe, the system fails because otherwise there would be no film called Fail-Safe.
Now we are totally into the film that I remember.
As an exercise in building tension, in a Cold War style, this film does the freakin’ business. Yes, people pontificate at length about the rights and wrongs of Mutually Assured Destruction. Yes, people overact badly. Yes, there is a lot of shouting.
And yes, it is distracting that one of the characters would later go on to play Boss Hogg in Dukes of Hazzard….
And yes, the President Fonda’s Russian translator is Larry Hagman from I Dream of Jeannie and Dallas, but with strangely bad teeth…
But the important thing, for me, now, in that bunker under a library, is that we are in the midst of the film that I remember. Maybe not in the details, but in the way the film builds fear, the closer the bombers get to their target. The harder they try to get them to turn back. The more the consequences of their failure become clear.
Then the past becomes the present, as these characters from the 1960’s, in their own bunkers, talk across political divides about the failure of computers, leading to a tragic outcome for humanity.
There is a ripple among the film nerds in the room, as the link to AI resonates.
By now I am fully back to where I was, as a kid, undoubtedly way too young to watch a film like Fail-Safe on TV, feeling the same dread I felt back then, growing up in a MAD world.
The dread that gave me the nightmares.
Many years later, in my post-graduate study at university, I made a documentary about the effects of a nuclear bomb detonated over Auckland city.
Seriously, that was how much this film stuck with me.
And the whole nuclear destruction thing that came with it, obviously.
From memory, I don’t think it was a great documentary, but if anyone has a U-matic player maybe we can test that one together…
[SPOILER ALERT: I AM NOT GOING TO SPOIL THE ENDING OF “FAIL-SAFE”]
So we got to the end of Fail-Safe.
It was exactly how I remembered it from when I was a kid.
It freaked me out, all over again.
My whanau totally got why it would have freaked me out.
Result.