Like Novel, Like Film

Unfortunately, Fail Safe is a faithful adaptation of the novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. Like the novel, the film is a work distinguished more by willful stupidity than by art. The premise is an impossible accident, with the fail-safe system still exhibiting baffling perversity, sending a signal because it breaks down; the body of the work is standard tension in the air and underground, with Professor Gro-teschele still on hand to give bad advice, though he is less like Herman Kahn, more like Walter Matthau; the solution is a disaster, with our President still compensating for the unintentional bombing of Moscow by bombing New York, though he is less like Kennedy, more like Henry Fonda: and the implication is still that such an accident and outcome are inevitable unless we disarm. Indeed, there is little to say about premise and effect that Sidney Hook did not say in The Fail-Safe Fallacy, except perhaps that the film contains some evidence that someone involved either thought a little for himself or considered Hook’s criticism, if only in order to misconstrue.

Just as the novel echoed Peter Bryant’s Red Alert to a litigious degree, so the film echoes Red Alert’s film version, Dr. Strangelove. As propaganda, Fail Safe is less partisan and less slanderous than Dr. Strange-love, Seven Days in May, or The Manchurian Candidate; but no less virulent; it displays less bad feeling, but at least as much bad thinking; and like the other Liberal science fiction, it exploits the fear of the machine in a more direct manner than science fiction films used to do, when they were aimed at deluded children, not at deluded intellectuals as well.

RH

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Richard M. Hodgens

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Unfortunately, Fail Safe is a faithful adaptation of the novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. Like the novel, the film is a work distinguished more by willful stupidity than by art. The premise is an impossible accident, with the fail-safe system still exhibiting baffling perversity, sending a signal because it breaks down; the body of the work is standard tension in the air and underground, with Professor Gro-teschele still on hand to give bad advice, though he is less like Herman Kahn, more like Walter Matthau; the solution is a disaster, with our President still compensating for the unintentional bombing of Moscow by bombing New York, though he is less like Kennedy, more like Henry Fonda: and the implication is still that such an accident and outcome are inevitable unless we disarm. Indeed, there is little to say about premise and effect that Sidney Hook did not say in The Fail-Safe Fallacy, except perhaps that the film contains some evidence that someone involved either thought a little for himself or considered Hook’s criticism, if only in order to misconstrue.

Just as the novel echoed Peter Bryant’s Red Alert to a litigious degree, so the film echoes Red Alert’s film version, Dr. Strangelove. As propaganda, Fail Safe is less partisan and less slanderous than Dr. Strange-love, Seven Days in May, or The Manchurian Candidate; but no less virulent; it displays less bad feeling, but at least as much bad thinking; and like the other Liberal science fiction, it exploits the fear of the machine in a more direct manner than science fiction films used to do, when they were aimed at deluded children, not at deluded intellectuals as well.