Fail-Safe: Aiming at Ourselves

This is what happens when a bunch of really smart Lefties (screenwriter Walter Bernstein was black-listed) decide they're more qualified to make policy than elected officials.

Fail-Safe is based on a false premise, even though the movie (directed by Sidney Lumet) is remarkably well-made. But it is equally wrong-headed. The problem is its moral equivalency: equating the world's worst regime (which killed 20 million of its own citizens) and the world's best (that's us, folks).

The plot: due to a mechanical failure, U.S. bombers get a false attack order because of purposeful Soviet electronic interferece, yet the entire film makes the U.S. out to be the sole offender even though no intent to bomb the U.S.S.R. is ever shown. So biased are the filmmakers that not even hawk Walter Matthau is allowed to say, "Hey! It was the Ruskies that interfered with our communications with the planes!"

And in the end, president Henry Fonda, in what has to be the most absurd example equivalency in history, orders nuclear bombs dropped on NewYork by American pilots.

Thankfully, we have almost fifty years of history since this film was made and we know the truth: MAD (mutual assured destruction) kept both sides honest through the first fifty years of the nuclear age. Ronald Reagan, understanding what Lumet et al. did not, decided that the Soviet regime could not compete with freedom, so he proposed we destroy the U.S.S.R., not by nuking it, but by spending it into the ground. He did that by rebuilding our military, placing Patriot missles in eastern Europe, and instigating research on a missile defense shield unfairly dubbed "Star Wars." Oh, and challenging Gorbachev to "tear down this wall!"

The fruits of his vision were these: just months after Reagan left office, the U.S.S.R. was indeed dumped into the ashcan of history. His confidence in freedom allowed Reagan to see the world in much clearer terms than these leftist filmmakers who, undoubtedly, subscribed to the stupider-than-dirt notion that we could and should live peacably with the Evil Empire.

It's also amusing that Fail-Safe was beaten to the punch by the release of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove just months before and so by the time Lumet's movie came out, parody and guffaws were the only response to a nuclear stand-off and Fail-Safe thus died at the box-office.

Yet the Left has a seemingly endless supply of fools, and George Clooney, enamored of the original film, set out to repeat Lumet's mistake, and did so in 2000. The movie was so bad it got relegated to TV and nobody saw it. Fitting.

Finally, the distributor of the original film tacked a scroll on the end of the film stating that a mechanical failure such as the one depicted in the movie is impossible. In the DVD extras, Lumet and his co-conspirators mockingly dismiss the disclaimer, but history once again proves them wrong: we never had a system failure and we beat the Soviets without firing a shot.

So much for the geniuses in Hollywood, except for the one who made it to the White House. Ronald Reagan really was a genius in the only way that matters--the genius of knowing the difference between right and wrong--and now the 300 million people of the former Soviet Union are free to make the same kind of stupid films Lumet made. Fortunately, a free market also decides if a movie is worth seeing, as it did with Fail-Safe (both versions).

The verdict? Fail-Safe fails.