Fail Safe | Classic Films

I can’t recall many actors who can pull off the perfect man act in the face of a doomsday scenario like Henry Fonda so effortlessly does in Sydney Lumet’s Cold War thriller Fail Safe, their third collaboration after 12 Angry Men and Stage Struck. The film based on a best-selling novel of the same is concerned with a fatal technical error committed by U S Army officials that might jeopardize the ongoing truce with the Soviet Union forces in the heights of the Cold War.T

The film opens with Dan O Herlihy, a general of the US Air troopers waking up to an abstract recurring dream that has been haunting him for years. The General shares with his wife his desire to leave the particularly demanding job for good and leaves to join a crucial pentagon meeting involving the Presidents Advisory officers and a dreaded political analyst Prof Groeteschele (Walter Matthau) who is introduced to us in an early scene as a calculative , shrewd man with nothing standing in his way other than the American cause in the war even if it means wiping out millions of lives in the process.

After the initial setup we are shown that the US Air Troopers stationed at the Soviet borders gets a “ Fail Safe “ false alarm from its camp as a result of a serious technical glitch leading a single fighter jet to a self-destructive doomsday mission off a nuclear attack on Moscow , the center of Soviet forces which might lead to a no holds barred war within the two countries. Sydney Lumet brings back shades of his impeccable craft in designing thriller contained in enclosed locations with a sense of high stakes claustrophobia within the first thirty minutes running time. The master sets up the characters with heated arguments that takes place between the advisory panel and the army General Bogan with the U S President (Henry Fonda). The stakes are revealed, and character motivations are also peeled off in well-staged sequences like from Lumet and Fonda’s classic courtroom drama 12 Angry Men.

The US Presidents interaction with the Soviet Premier runs parallel with the ongoing attempts to call back the jet in question that can wreak havoc on reaching the destination forms the rest of this sharply written thriller clocking an economic one eighty-two-minute runtime. Henry Fonda’s calm facial demeaner renders great details to Lumet’s trademark extreme close-up shots charting the president’s emotional journey with integral revelations later in the narrative. Fail Safe is a slow burning , anti-war thriller that can give any of the atmospheric thrillers of the current age a run for their money and is an worthy entry in Sydney Lumet’s esteemed filmography.