1964 war, dir. Sidney Lumet, Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau:
IMDb. Once the machinery of
apocalypse has been started, do you even want to stop it?
This film is based on the 1962 novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey
Wheeler. In turn that novel apparently owes quite a bit to Red Alert
(1958) by Peter George, to the extent that when Dr Strangelove was
being made Kubrick started and Columbia backed a copyright
infringement lawsuit. That was settled out of court, but one of the
results was that this film was bought by Columbia, and they held on to
it for several months while Strangelove was released.
And maybe it's just my taste but this struck me from the start as a
much better film. All the planes are stock footage, and most of the
film happens on a very few sets, but the money has gone on one of
those sets and particularly on the actors; they are experienced pros,
and they do an excellent job (particularly Walter Matthau with his
deliberately punchable air of unconquerable smugness). A score was
written, but Lumet decided instead to stick with diegetic sound, which
is a thing that often wins me over (a good score will subtly cue me as
to how to feel about a scene, but too many will instead hit me over
the head with it).
Unlike Strangelove, this has more than one woman in the cast. And
some of them even have something to do! (But only very briefly.)
The "Vindicator" bombers are conveniently not a real aircraft, so when
I point out that an actual B-58 has three individual escape pods in a
row rather than a nice roomy cockpit, well, it's a different plane.
Similarly, while the speed and range seem not wildly unlike that of a
real B-58, the payload is much greater.
A surprise to me is the casting of Buck the interpreter, a very young
Larry Hagman, whom I was mostly aware of as a rather older man in the
1980s. His first film role was this year, though he'd been doing
theatre and TV for a decade before.
Overall this feels much more real, and therefore to me more
effective, than the broad parody of Strangelove. Though both of them
effectively portray the horror of mechanisation: there is no actual
human voice saying "go and end the world", it's all about verifying
the alphanumeric code. Indeed, I see John Badham's WarGames (1983)
as inspired by this, particularly the opening sequence, in which a
land-based silo crew refuses to obey a fire order that turns out to be
a drill.
There was a remake in 2000; as often I wonder why, since the producers
changed as little as possible, even to the extent of shooting in black
and white. It's notable now for two things; it featured George Clooney
fresh off ER and early in his film career, and it was one of the
last TV dramas mounted and broadcast live (and the first one since
1960).
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.