RETROSPECTIVE
‘Fail Safe’ At 60: The Classic Suspense Drama About A Nuclear Catastrophe
The Pentagon sabotaged this film, which suggested that not even President Henry Fonda could prevent a nightmarish accident.
Within director Sidney Lumet’s film “Fail Safe” lies an idealism that challenges nuclear warfare and the folly of great power competition.
A catastrophic military accident forces the President, played by Henry Fonda, to acknowledge that the United States and the Soviet Union let the Cold War nuclear arms race get out of hand. The President declares, “What we put between us, we can remove.”
The film premiered at the New York Film Festival on September 15, 1964, and opened in the U.S. on October 7. It was based on a book by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, which Walter Bernstein adapted for the screen. Bernstein was blacklisted in the 1950s and understood the fear and paranoia fueled by the Cold War quite well.
Pentagon officials despised the movie and sabotaged the production. “The incidents in ‘Fail Safe’ are deliberate lies!” cried General Curtis LeMay, a professed war criminal who firebombed Tokyo. “Nothing like that could happen.”
