I don't believe this was a propaganda film necessarily. And I don't think it was released "just-in-time" for 1964.
The message of this film was not to let our machines get out of our control. It's one thing to build for a deterrence. It's another to completely automate things to the point that it takes the Responsibility out of the hands of everyone involved.
On the contrary, I'd say it's quite Conservative in approach, because we're all into Responsibility. Leftist usually want to avoid it altogether, especially if things go badly for them.
I've seen many of the scenarios, responses, and plans considered in the event of a Soviet first strike that killed the President, VP, and several other people, and the concern was that we might all be annihilated in succeeding strikes before we got a decision from the next in the line of Presidential succession authorizing the release of nuclear weapons. That's partly what Dr. Strangelove was all about, to automate systems to the point that humans end up taking orders from a machine because they're trained to.
The scene where they got Colonel Grady's wife on the phone at Omaha was a great example. The Colonel stopped thinking, and resorted to his training. I don't blame him, really, because he was being shot at, he's flying near the deck, and he was moments away from the target. But if he managed to think about it, he probably would've considered that the odds of the Soviets knowing exactly which plane he was flying, know who precisely it was that was in command of it, and have someone pretend to be his wife at that exact moment would all be astronomical.
The point of that was irony. Grady himself said he preferred the human to the machine, but he resorted right to his training when the heat was on. He became what he detested, a machine rather than a man.
Responsibility is a great and terrible thing, but we must shoulder it. Individually. And we can't shirk from it. We need to crave it, rather than avoid it. That's a very conservative message.
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simplemines
13 years ago
"I don't believe this was a propaganda film necessarily. And I don't think it was released "just-in-time" for 1964. "
What you think is wrong. The film was released on October 4, 1964 in NYC; the presidential election was a month away.
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Growltiger
13 years ago
Yes Fail-Safe was released not long before the 1964 elections. But the timing had more to do with commercial interests rather than some designed anti-Goldwater response. To say its fall release was just political is a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument. It is not as if the topic of nuclear annihilation was something new. As someone observed above, the novel was published in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in October 1962. Dr. Strangelove was released earlier in the year by the same studio. (More on this in a moment.)
Now President Johnson's "Daisy" commercial was unleashed in September of 1964 and that was a heavy-handed attempt to conflate Senator Goldwater's politics with the politics of mutually assured destruction. But it is dubious to assume that Columbia decided to rush the release of Fail Safe in order to pile on to some kind of anti-Goldwater sentiment.
Columbia had the movie in the production at the same time as Dr. Strangelove. Stanley Kubrick was not pleased with the prospect of topical competition. Columbia released Dr. Strangelove in January 1964 and delayed the release of Fail-Safe until the fall of that year. As a matter of fact, Senator Goldwater was not a lock for the Republican presidential nomination until the summer of 1964.
Columbia owned a property with a distinguished director and cast. The movie was topical. Dr. Strangelove was a commercial success. (For what it is worth, the movie Fail-Safe did not match that commerical success although it received good notices from film critics.) It was bound to be release some time.
Fail-Safe is not anti-Goldwater although it is anti-real-politik. The "Daisy" commercial clearly was ant-Goldwater. The former was a sober assessment of what could happen if technology got out of control. Good men with good intentions committed themselves to terrible deeds with awful consequences. The latter tried to tap into a common fear of nuclear annihilation for political purpose. Do not conflate the two even though they tapped into popular concern about nuclear annihilation.
Be seeing you...
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WyldeGoose
13 years ago
The problem with this notion is that you're applying modern film distribution abilities that didn't exist back in 1964. In major cities, sure, but not in every smaller town and burb did Fail Safe get everywhere. When I talk to older folks who were around way before Star Wars came out, they say some films would take years after release to get to their local theater. My Dad didn't see Fail Safe until 1970.
So, while it would've been released in the cities in all likelihood it wouldn't have made that big of an impact on anything. But even so, to any free-thinking human being, this is not a film advocating disarmament. I know, it's Sydney Lumet directing, but this was a discussion about a situation getting out of control but at the Nuclear level.
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gevansmd
13 years ago
This is a good movie but if you watch the special feature on its making they openly admit it was made by committed leftists (not leftwingers, but leftists). The actor who plays General Black said he went to the Soviet Union and in 2 months realized all our government had said about their evil intent was a lie. Wow, he could tell that from 2 months? If a westerner visited the Soviet Union he was escorted to only those places the KGB wanted him to see and fed propaganda and hel fell for it. The words of the President at the end says it all, essentially a defeatist speech. This after ordering the murder of his own people as a show of good will.
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franzkabuki
13 years ago
Depends on what you mean by "evil intent" - if it´s active seeking of world domination & spreading communism via direct military action, then that did indeed blow over around the early 50´s when even Stalin realized before his death that it was, at that point, simply unrealistic. One wouldn´t have had to travel to USSR to gather that, though - unless one´s extremely paranoid. Or needed the fear mongering for political gain.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan
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