Fail Safe

In film critic Bilge Ebiri's essay about Sidney Lumet's "Fail Safe," he rightfully mentions that the late, great director may be held up in the pantheon of greatest filmmakers, but his work isn't brought up in stylistic terms. If his somewhat forgotten 1964 film about nuclear paranoia is any indication, Lumet had a modest shooting style and knew early on in his career how to block in ways that elevate emotionally propulsive performances and plots wrought with tension.

"Fail Safe" came out in the same year as Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," which immediately cast a huge shadow over the production. Lumet's crack at showcasing the inhumanity in Cold War-era politics shares similar narrative threads to Kubrick's masterpiece, but as Bilge Ebiri also noted in his booklet essay, but no tonal similarities. If anything, the handling of the material is indicative of both of the filmmakers' house styles. Kubrick with hilarious nihilism and Lumet with finding the humanity in the inhumane. With Criterion's new Blu-ray release of "Fail Safe," this lesser-known and barebones thriller gets the time of day it deserves, as it depicts an impossible situation with personal feelings in revolt against the despicable.

After a computer error causes orders to be sent out to an American bomber group to drop nuclear warheads on Moscow, the president (Henry Fonda) and the United States military chain of command must race against time to stop the attack from happening. But with Soviet countermeasures scrambling radio communications to the bomber group, nuclear war is all but imminent.

There's this really great scene in "Fail Safe," although a bit on the nose, about how the computers we trust to run the American military often make very subtle mistakes that no human can predict. Lumet focuses in on the whirring and white noise coming out of nearby computers. In one way, they're overlaying the dialogue in off-putting ways. There's no clear communicating when the machines we trust are driving us to make binary decisions. And as is Lumet's wont, the war room in which most of the film takes place is like a stage for the director. He's able to shoot around it in ways that evoke whatever is going on in the plot. Claustrophobic close-ups are sweaty and filled with internal turmoil.

The new 4K restoration on this Criterion Blu-ray is brilliant, interlacing genuine film grain with sharp contrast between black and white. There are so many shots that use shadow to evoke whatever is happening in the scene, and they all come off vividly. While there aren't a lot of new extras to parse through, with most being carried over from the DVD of "Fail Safe" that was released in 2000, there's a new interview with critic J. Hoberman that's worth the price of purchase alone. Hoberman is the kind of interviewee that can not only add historical context to anything he's talking about but deep insight into a style that comes off clear and attuned to whoever is listening. Other special features include:

� Audio commentary from 2000 featuring director Sidney Lumet
� "Fail Safe" Revisited, a short documentary from 2000 including interviews with Lumet, screenwriter Walter Bernstein, and actor Dan O'Herlihy

"Fail Safe"
Criterion Blu-ray
$39.95
https://www.criterion.com/films/28825-fail-safe