Fail Safe (1964) on Netflix
A computer fault sends Colonel Jack Grady's bomber group toward Moscow on orders that look genuine. The President races to stop the flight, but Soviet jamming blocks the recall.
- Netflix4.3/5
- IMDb8.0/1028,399 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes93%
Trailer
Plot summary
An unidentified aircraft over Hudson Bay puts the air defense network on alert, and the intruder proves to be a civilian airliner that had wandered off course. In the confusion that follows, a computer short sends Group 6, a flight of Vindicator bombers under Colonel Jack Grady, what appear to be authentic orders to strike Moscow. Grady obeys, and the aircraft head out over the Arctic. In Washington, the President works to bring them back, yet the safeguards meant to defeat a false recall and better than expected Soviet jamming stop every message. Brigadier General Warren Black, a friend of the President from college, warns that any wider response invites retaliation, while the strategist Groeteschele argues that the accident could be turned to American advantage. Fighters are sent after Group 6.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Fail Safe (1964)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Fail Safe's story so resembled Peter George's novel Red Alert, which Stanley Kubrick adapted as Dr. Strangelove, that Kubrick and George filed a copyright infringement lawsuit. It was settled out of court, with Columbia Pictures buying and distributing the independently produced Fail Safe, and Kubrick insisting his own film be released first.
- Jazz musician Hal Schaefer wrote a score for the film, but Sidney Lumet chose not to use it and played the film without non-diegetic music. Snippets of the discarded score can be heard in the trailer, and Columbia Records released a five-minute suite of it on vinyl.
- The US Department of Defense and Air Force refused to cooperate because the premise involved a lack of control over nuclear strike forces, and the finished film ends with a full-screen, all-capitals message stating their position that safeguards make such an event impossible.
- Because the Air Force objected to showing the nuclear strike force thrown into deadly disarray by an equipment malfunction and declined to cooperate, the "Vindicator" bombers are stock footage of Convair B-58 Hustlers, which could fly at twice the speed of sound, with intercepting fighters shown as F-101, F-102 and F-104 jets.
- The flying sequences were shown in photographic negative to give a nightmarish look, as if lit by a nuclear flash, and in several of those shots the "Soviet interceptors" are French-built Dassault Mirage III fighters carrying Israeli markings.
- The character of Groeteschele was inspired, according to director Sidney Lumet's audio commentary, by Hudson Institute military strategist Herman Kahn.
