The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

John Huston has always been the advocate of character and situation rather than over-stylization of cinema. Huston himself has the element of the rogue adventurer about him: leaving America for Europe to study art after an already colourful childhood, then later joining the Mexican Cavalry, where he developed his talents as a writer, and then in time, back to America and Hollywood as a scriptwriter and later director.

Of his varied body of work (of which one only has to look at Escape to Victory to see how varied!), the one film of his I most admire is this one. This is a film noir with a decidedly more gritty edge - Huston himself was a pioneer of the genre with The Maltese Falcon - but this time imbued with a kind of neo-realism that was influenced by the European movement of the time, especially Italy and France. 

The protagonists in this film are those who would normally (up until then) be considered the antagonists: crooks, racketeers and general reprobates. Their leader and chief coordinator is as far removed from a Sydney Greenstreet type as could be imagined: the little sage-like ex-convict "Doc" Riedenschneider (veteran Sam Jaffe), newly released but with a wily, careful plan for stealing diamonds with the right men, his mantra being that "crime is a form of left-handed endeavour." His chief soldier in the operation is Sterling Hayden as Dix Handley, a tough guy but with his heart in the right place, who has never had the lucky breaks. Further down the league table of dishonourable mention in this gang come Anthony Mancuso, James Whitmore, Marc Lawrence, and Louis Calhern as the slimy distinguished lawyer Alonzo Emmerich financing the operation, his chief weakness being his 'niece' Angela Phinlay, played in hauntingly sensual fashion by the one and only Marilyn Monroe, whom Huston shrewdly cast in her first major dramatic role.

Also just as haunting though less glamorous of course than Marilyn, is "Doll", Dix's girlfriend, poignantly unable to control her eyelashes under the tears of personal strife (another brilliant character touch by Huston), and played by the excellent character star Jean Hagen, later to gain cinematic immortality as the squeaky-voiced silent movie star of Singin' in the Rain.

The law enforcement as such in this caper - what would be considered in old Hollywood as the necessary moral backbone - is pretty much in the sidelines.  As the persevering crooks go their separate ways however, and the ensuing, almost inevitable double crossing starts, the Law gradually closes in on them, and the world-weary police chief (John McIntire), has the perfect riposte, as he switches on the various police radios that are constantly in operation around the city:

"We send police assistance to every one of those calls, cos they're not just code numbers on a radio beam, they're cries for help! People are being cheated, robbed, murdered, raped! That goes on 24 hours of the day, every day in the year, and that's not exceptional, that's usual, it's the same in every city of the modern world. But suppose we had no police force, good or bad? Suppose we had...[turns off the radios]...just silence? Nobody to listen, nobody to answer. The battle's finished, the jungle wins. The predatory beasts take over. Think about it."

Chicken Run (2000)

"You've read the book, you've seen the film, now eat the pie!", so read one soon-to-be-ex-butcher when he churlishly advertised rabbit for sale when Watership Down was released in cinemas in 1978. Conversely, there was a hope among researchers at distributing studio Dreamworks that the release of Chicken Run would lead to an upsurge of vegans, thanks to the positive portrayal of chickens as heroes in the film. Great as the animated chickens are, I enjoyed the film at the Odeon Colchester so much I felt like having some nice KFC! As one male friend joked to me, that Julia Sawalha is pretty tasty.

Such is the endearing British humour towards animals that the Aardman studio have pioneered, with their hilarious animations that reached their most epic proportions with this film, with Sawalha and several other British actors of note - plus one American star name, Mel Gibson - providing the voices of a plucky band of chickens in a pastiche of The Great Escape with a chicken farm run in the manner of Stalag Luft II.

My first introduction to the world of Nick Park came in 1988, during the Showreel 88 amateur film makers contest. My own fledgling entry Deathouse was among the also-rans, but among the shortlisted entries was an animation where a dog was activating a drill, then put the drill into reverse, and instead of the drill rotating, the dog did! This would go on to become Nick Park's first major animation A Grand Day Out, featuring the now beloved duo of Wallace and Gromit. 

Not long after this came along some electricity TV advertisements, where a tortoise in exercise gear talked about needing his energy "easily turn off-and-onable", and other subsequent little gems, which were the direct influence (or by-product) of Park's award winning Creature Comforts. His assistant and fellow animator at the Aardman studio in Bristol was Peter Lord (creator also of the wonderful Morph on Take Hart), who together collaborated for their magnum opus Chicken Run, taking the Wallace and Gromit formula one step further.

To their credit, Park and Lord did not stick safely with their established characters, but to create a brand new set of characters, who would probably fit into the same world as Wallace and Gromit. The head farmer, Mr. Tweedy (voiced wonderfully by Tony Haygarth), could easily be a beleaguered variation of Wallace, had Wallace himself not stayed single and married someone as ferocious as Mrs Tweedy (the superb Miranda Richardson), the ultimate nemesis for the imprisoned chickens of Tweedy's Farm.

Down at camp level, the plucky chickens are led by the feisty Miss Sawalha as Ginger, a slightly gormless but wonderfully comedic Babs voiced by Jane Horrocks, her more truculent counterpart Bunty (Imelda Staunton), supported by two spivish rats voiced by Timothy Spall and Phil Daniels (their end credits discussion about the Chicken or Egg debate is a delightful epilogue), and in a direct reference to The Great Escape, there is the lovely Benjamin Whitrow as an RAF cockerell, and Lynn Ferguson as Ginger's science bod Mac (a direct reference to Gordon Jackson, and even - briefly - Scotty from Star Trek). My favourite of all the many spoof or visual gags is the use of Toblerone for "chocks away" during one daring flight (a direct reference to another classic war film, The Dam Busters.)

Animation itself has since evolved into almost total dependency on computers. Chicken Run can therefore be viewed as a classic of the old school, in the same way that Disney reached their peak with hand-drawn animation in the 1940s. It's still a darn good watch on TV.

Russian Ark (2002)

This, to put it simply and bluntly, is one of the greatest films ever made. Technically speaking it is also a minor miracle; this also, in an era after the 20th century when films have become less about art and more about processed, manufactured entertainment - and also coming from a nation once noted for its high-speed editing and montage from the likes of Sergei Eisenstein.

Russian Ark by contrast, is a film made all in one shot (more or less), for 99 minutes.

There have been many experiments over the decades of a continuous form of film without editing, where the camera is not static and moves around locations following characters in one continuous movement. Alfred Hitchcock took a fancy to the gimmick in 1948 with Rope, with moving walls so that his camera could track around a single Manhattan apartment (below): the restrictions of only 10 minutes worth of film in the camera led to the "10 minute take", where Hitch cleverly tried to smooth out the transition by ending the reel with the camera going into shadow facing a completely black surface (ie. a character's back, or the infamous chest in which the victim is stored.)

Orson Welles, ever the innovator, tried his hand with a bravura opening sequence of Touch of Evil with the camera tracking around various streets of a California border town. Such a feat could only last up to those precious 10 minutes of film - plus a considerable amount of dexterity from the crew. In recent years, there have also been subsequent experiments at "real time" filming, in the likes of Birdman or 1917, reverting to the Hitchcock trick of subtle transitions when the camera is obscured.

It was the coming of digital technology however, that "freed" director Alexandr Sokurov, once the quality of image had reached film levels, and he was thus able to record almost unlimited minutes of cinematography onto a computer. Shooting in and around the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, he also had the perfect canvas for his camera to prowl around.

But technicalities were only the first hurdle - for this one film has thousands of extras from different centuries, all being filmed in one afternoon, from the 18th century in one scene, then straight to the Stalinist 1940s with the Germans on the brink of conquering Leningrad (as St. Petersburg became known), then back to the time of Catherine the Great (Mariya Kuznetsova), suddenly inconvenienced and in need of urinating somewhere in the snowy palace gardens.

In a medium which has often been equated as having a dream-like quality, this is very much one film as a dream - a hypnotic, nostalgic, compelling one.

Its story, as such, is guided through by an unseen narrator (the voice of Sokurov himself) who greets a European (Sergei Dreiden), based on the Marquis de Custine, who wonders around the world's largest art gallery including the connecting Winter Palace, built in the era of Catherine the Great, and also the residence of the last of  the Romanov dynasty - Tsar Nicholas is seen poignantly trying to keep his children under control - before that family's barbaric demise in 1918.

Sokurov clearly yearns for this older, more romantic era when Russia was among those Imperialist countries that very much imported the cultural influence of Western Europe including France and Italy. 

At the end of the ball that climaxes the film, the many guests file their way out through the corridors, like ghosts of history still lost in time; the girl whom the Marquis has been dancing with is seen among them, with a whimsical look on her face as she leaves with another man on her arm.

I was travelling back through London one February evening, with a local theatre group improv evening to go to, or the option of going to the Renoir cinema in Bloomsbury to see Russian Ark. Time has reassured me that I definitely made the right choice.

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) (and The Longest Day (1962))

    Pearl Harbour aflame in 1941, and below, as depicted in Tora! Tora! Tora!

History, they say, is written by the victors. This one dared to tell the story from both sides. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt said at the time, history will not remember who fired the first shot but who fired the last. The Japanese attack was at least (for him) a convenient means of how to get America into a war that was rapidly spiralling out of control in Europe and Asia, and for whom he had been at pains to try and supply his allies whilst keeping the pretence of neutrality. The one person who was most 'pleased' by the attack ultimately was Winston Churchill, who knew that America's entering WWII would help to turn the tide.

In an era when history is often sidelined when it comes to historical films, here is one from the time that scrupulously kept to the record, wherever possible. The truth as they also say, is often stranger than fiction.

To put Tora! Tora! Tora! into its proper context, one also has to mention (and sneakily add as an extra favourite film to this blog) its similarly epic predecessor The Longest Day, conceived by producer Daryl Zanuck as a tribute to those men and the whole operation of D-Day. As an operation very much involving several countries (on both sides), he chose to stage it from different perspectives from the American, French, British and German perspectives. For all of its idiosyncrasies (such as Rod Steiger and Richard Burton - right - doing walk-on parts), it remains the definitive telling of D-Day, from many of the original locations.

I may be in the minority here, but TTT  improves on The Longest Day by having more of a dramatic focus by telling the story from two specific perspectives, and also having the greater dramatic and historic power, particularly for Americans.

In order to re-create the story of the attack authentically, Zanuck likewise felt the need to use two simultaneous crews from Japan and America to tell the tale. From the American perspective, the reliable craftsman Richard Fleischer was hired to direct in rather pedestrian fashion, although the bulk of the major action that headlines the film is in his section, in addition to which he captures the escalating tension and unwitting incompetence of the American intelligence service that fails to act on fateful information that the Japanese attack was coming.

Maybe this why the film was generally critically panned at the time - it dared to commit the great Hollywood sin: depicting Americans as losers. Whilst The Longest Day had John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda and others triumphantly marching into Normandy, TTT is rather more muted in terms of star power: Joseph Cotten (above) is one of the few star names to pop up, the rest are excellent character actors of varying degrees of fame (similarly with the Japanese cast - Soh Yamamura was a supporting player in the acclaimed Tokyo Story.) This is where the history is much more important than the star-spotting. 

Time has been kinder to TTT however, and its screening on television was where I was first introduced to it. The film also tries to redress the balance over who in American eyes were to blame for the failure of the US to react effectively to the attack - in effect, the scapegoats: Admiral Kimmel (Martin Balsam) of the navy and General Short (Jason Robards) of the army, both stationed in Hawaii at the time.

One of many poignant images: the Japanese America farmers in Hawaii before the war itself is about to change the course of their lives forever.

The more skilful and more powerful piece of filmmaking however comes - as in the battle attack itself - from the Japanese angle. The two Japanese directors, Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku, capture the mood, the emotions and, in particular, the dignity of the Japanese Navy, pressured into going to war by the overzealous army and an ambitious Japanese Government, more influenced by the likes of General Tojo (Asao Uchida, left) than the Emperor Hirohito, accompanied also by a fine score for these scenes, by the American Jerry Goldsmith.

The most intriguing aspect of the Japanese half of the film is that it was originally to be directed (and shot - for just one week) by Akira Kurosawa - a legend in Japan for his autonomy, and unused to the foreign environment of working for an American film studio who called the shots more than he did. Twentieth Century Fox took the bold move of firing the great director. We can only speculate on how his style would have impacted had he been allowed the free artistic reign he was more accustomed to in his own country. In spite of Kurosawa's absence, the replacement directors do more than a creditable job - a reminder to largely ignorant English-speaking audiences of the depth of talent on offer in Japan.

The Zeroes take off - footage allegedly directed by the great Kurosawa

The showpiece of the film is the of course the raid itself, and the spectacular effects, both on and above ground - so much so that the footage was used for several subsequent WWII films (and even some documentaries which mistook it for the real archive.) The film also captures in semi-documentary fashion some of the ironies and authentic small true incidents, such as the hapless flying school instructor who suddenly found herself surrounded one morning by squadrons of Japanese planes, or the impact of the USS Arizona's explosion glancing even the Japanese planes that had destroyed her - in a similar semi-observational manner to A Night to Remember, with subtlety and no great fanfare, but quiet effect and power.

Like A Night to Remember, TTT itself also suffered the peculiar fate of a rather romanticised and trashy modern remake, directed by Michael Bay in 2001, about which the less said of Pearl Harbor, the better. It did at least serve to remind just what a quality product TTT was.

Over a quarter of a century after the first major attack on United States shores (if an island 2,000 miles away from the mainland can be considered on America's "doorstep"), its impact is still felt - a reaction of shock and revulsion among most Americans, that was reflected, once more, 70 years later, when the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington were attacked by Al Qaeda terrorists.

Martin Balsam and Soh Yamamura reflect the gravity of the event felt by both Navies - the prophetic quote at the end is alleged to have come from Yamamoto's diary.

Kafka (1991)

This comes under the category - of which there are many other candidates - of the "curiosity interest" film. Over the years that I've followed films and their development, news filters through of those in production which quickly become a "must see" in the mind's eye. For example, there was much anticipation and expectation when Francis Ford Coppola planned to make a faithful version of the original novel Dracula - the resulting film, entitled Bram Stoker's Dracula, betrayed the hint in the title that it was pretending to be a faithful version: the film had its admirers but they were more of Coppola's work than Bram Stoker's. Nevertheless, the expectation prior to the film was immense. There are other items in this page (Postcards from the Edge or Star Wars Episode I), which live up to their expectations, or others that do not.  

So it was too with Kafka, Steven Soderbergh's anticipated second film after the acclaimed Sex, Lies and Videotape that had won him the Palme D'Or at Cannes. The phrase "second film" seems to be something of a potential curse for successful filmmakers, especially in Hollywood: free of all constraints from the first film, second time around the director is a tried and tested "hot property" who can make whatever film he chooses that a grateful studio will entrust him with: John Sturges was successful enough with The Magnificent Seven to persuade United Artists to finance The Great Escape; George Lucas's American Graffiti was a big enough smash to persuade Alan Ladd Jnr to green-light the improbable Star Wars; Quentin Tarantino had made enough of a mark with Reservoir Dogs to be able to roll the dice even more audaciously with Pulp Fiction. Perhaps most notoriously, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter gave him the power to make Heaven's Gate, whose ultimate failure caused an entire Hollywood studio to go out of business.

With Kafka therefore, Soderbergh was playing an equally dangerous game in taking something entirely removed from the style of his first film: a paranoia thriller in black and white, no less, in 1991. Up until then, only The Elephant Man in 1980 or Coppola's Rummble Fish in 1983, or other relatively obscure, arty films had dared to do this since the process became largely obsolete in the mid 1960s. In fairness, the only one who really managed to pull off the gimmick successfully was Steven Spielberg with Schindler's List.

Outside of commercial interests however, black and white still retains its magic and sense of mystery, particularly in a film such as this. Orson Welles once said that black and white was the only proper medium to convey the drama and the emotion of the human face: colour distracted and brought too much awareness of the pigmentation of the skin (all but his last three films were made in black and white). It is likewise, two of Orson's most famous films, The Trial and most particularly The Third Man, that served as a benchmark for Soderbergh. His cast was, likewise, a mixture of British, American and international faces, with the likes of Theresa Russell, Jeroen Krabbe, Joel Grey (almost as one critic put it, as if his MC from Cabaret was on a day job!), Armin Mueller-Stahl, Biran Glover, Ian Holm, and even veterans like Alec Guinness and Robert Flemyng lured to play supporting roles. The always treasured sight of Guinness in a film in his later career is a typically unexpected one from him (as the Chief Clerk), but full of wry, quiet humour amid suppressed menace in his two scenes with Kafka. 

In the title role, Soderbergh only ever had one  actor in mind: the tall but otherwise similarly slim, gawky and nervously handsome Jeremy Irons, who brings an intelligent yet clumsy and nervous tension to the role and the decaying, uncertain Bohemian atmosphere around him.

It is not a biopic of Kafka as such, but a semi-fantasy drama incorporating elements of Kafka's life and the settings of some of his stories (most particularly The Trial and The Castle). 

 
Things start to get creepy in the castle when the film suddenly switches over from mundane, atmospheric black-and-white, to in-your-face 'literal' colour (a la Wizard of Oz, although Powell and Pressburger reversed the process in A Matter of Life and Death from colour to b&w).

This perhaps is ultimately the film's main failing: once the sinister Dr. Murnau (a cheeky homage to the director of Nosferatu), is revealed in the flesh, all the implied terror becomes actual, and yet in the low-key presence of the talented Ian Holm, Murnau is less of a figure of fear that a would-be hack doctor with ideas above his station. The requisite chase scene in a (fantasy) film of this kind seems routine, before things return to the mundane and more comfortable black-and-white world of everyday Prague, after the colour interlude; Kafka has seen into the dark recesses of the Castle, and is depressingly content to stay in his own environment and write his stories, which turn out to have an even more vivid imagination than reality (as expected).

As such it is neither commercial entertainment or "arthouse" character observation: for some, it falls between two stools - which accounts for its relative obscurity, and the fact that I didn't get round to seeing it at the MGM Shaftesbury Avenue until two years later in 1993! I nonetheless found it a quirky, eye-catching experience, particularly with such an interesting cast, in such an old world environment.

I was lucky enough to visit Prague itself for the first time in 2017: it is the only one of the three great cultural Bohemian cities of Eastern Europe (alongside Berlin and Vienna) to have survived the ravages of history and still remained largely intact from the 19th century. The city itself is in many ways the star of Kafka, with its old, looming statues of the Saints watching over the characters like ghosts - two key locations are, of course, the giant castle (with the imposing Sternbersky Palace), and the original (and at the time, sole) bridge over the Vltava, the King Charles Bridge (named after the monarch under whose reign the bridge was designed and constructed.)

I recently watched Sex, Lies and Videotape for a second time to appreciate its virtues as a film - but I have seen bits of Kafka constantly in the intervening decades. Such a film has that curiosity value, and it's true that a lot more can be garnered from a director's "failed" film than from many of his successes.

Jeremy Irons on King Charles Bridge (also below)

Around the World in Eighty Days (1955)

Ironic, and yet perhaps appropriate, at the time of writing when the world is in shutdown from a pandemic, to cover a film that crosses the globe; appropriate because it allows audiences the experience of travelling the world, of a kind, from the benefit of their own cinema seat - or now their sofa at home on video.

"It's a wonderful world, if you'll only take the time to go around it!"

For the ultimate enduring success of the epic, we owe it to three principal gentlemen: firstly to its showmanlike New York producer Mike Todd - with a little creative inspiration from Jules Verne (who duly "drops" his book down from the heavens in Saul Bass's amusing title sequence): the novel is a fast-paced adventure yarn about a stuffy, enigmatic member of the London Reform Club, Phileas Fogg (very much the stereotypical English gentleman from a French perspective), who is suddenly dared into travelling around the world in 80 days - as boasted by modern transport in 1872. Fogg's sudden decision comes to the equal surprise of his new French manservant Passepartout, only recently thrust into the job after a visit to the London Employment Exchange to fill the new position of a "gentleman's gentleman."

This scene of Passepartout's recruitment is among the first of many witty vignettes which pepper throughout the film in between its epic journeys by road, rail, sea, and (via cinematic invention) by air, in a balloon.

No less a person than John Gielgud is the unfortunate predecessor to Passepartout's role, driven to distraction by Fogg's fastidiousness in requiring baths to be specific sizes, and his toast to be cooked at 23 degrees, no more, no less. "Extraordinary, how does one measure the temperature of toast?", asks Gielgud's employer, played by Noel Coward!

Coward was Todd's big catch: regarded then (and still now) as "The Master" of British theatre, he proved to be the hook that managed to get most of the British supporting cast into the film: Gielgud, and many others. That, together with Todd's own charm and dogged persuasiveness (and probably some form of lucrative reward for the actors), he managed to entice no less than 44 guest stars into the film, in "cameo" roles (an expression coined by Todd himself), and a suitable cosmopolitan bunch for a cinematic journey round the world - even if most of the cameos had a slight Hollywood bent.

Charles Boyer was among the 44 guest stars lured by Michael's Todd's money (and Phileas Fogg's)

The second key gentleman next to Todd himself, was his Passepartout in the form of the charismatic David Niven as Phileas Fogg. Niven was baying for the role, and he seems a natural choice today, but back in the 1950s he only occasionally merited leading man status. Samuel Goldwyn was once at pains in the 1940s to make him a new Hollywood leading man in the mould of Ronald Colman (who has a cameo in this film), but the stronger calling of duty to his country brought Niven back to Britain during World War II.

After the war his career consolidated but never took off. Around the World in Eighty Days was a grand showcase, for all the many players, of whom Niven was the most frequently seen throughout the film. The role surmises all his suave gentlemen he ever played, with an added flavour of English punctiliousness.

The third key and largely overlooked key figure in the success of Around the World in Eighty Days was the unassuming figure of director Michael Anderson. A production assistant and also brief actor (sparring once with John Mills in In Which We Serve), his film career prospered with The Dam Busters in 1954, now considered a classic (in spite of its naive special effects), and it impressed Michael Todd enough to replace original director John Farrow with Anderson - who, unlike Farrow, quickly accepted who the real boss of 80 Days was. This also however allowed Anderson to work with the key core of the movie, namely, the principal four participants on the long journey - Fogg, Passepartout, the princess (a miscast but pleasant Shirley MacLaine), and Inspector Fix (a gorgeous swansong by Robert Newton).

30 years after The General, Buster Keaton is still busy on the railways

I read the book first: the film is a surprisingly faithful adaptation, particularly in its depiction of London and of the novel's sudden twist ending. Television, being what it was in those days, could give only limited scope to the breadth of Todd's original epic. A video release restricted the picture to pan-and-scan square ratios, but commendably much of the humour still comes through. It took its time for widescreen TV to give the broad perspective of the Todd-AO canvas - and now in disc form, comes the film in as much of the original 1950s presentation style as could be presented.

It is very much a product of an era when movies were made primarily to entertain, and for the audience to have good time - in many ways, a form of cinematic circus, with lots of guests artistes, thrills and spills and laughs on the way. Other all-star adventures duly came along in its wake, such as Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World, Monte Carlo or Bust, The Great Race, and others - until movies felt the need to grow up and offer less fluffy spectacle.

Around the World in Eighty Days had its exclusive London run in 1957 at the Astoria in Charing Cross Road 

Fail Safe (1964)

In the news recently it was revealed in 1983 a Soviet engineer actually had the foresight to prevent World War III, when he correctly surmised an attack by US missiles to be a computer error. Perhaps he had read the book Fail Safe as his guiding light - certainly my father had, in one gripping read, which Sidney Lumet makes into an equally gripping film.

The 1963 film version just happened to suffer the fate of being made the same year - and by the same studio, Columbia - as Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Kubrick's aforementioned film starring Peter Sellers was released first, and thus won the plaudits and the awards and a niche in cinematic history. Fail Safe, which followed it after a delayed release, is to my mind the much more effective film, particularly at depicting the escalating horror of its subject.

It's one of the curious ironies of modern culture that the same story tends to get told at the same time; whether through the general zeitgeist of the period, or perhaps that sneaky agents or writers got hold of other people's ideas and thrust them forward: also in the 1960s, there were two biopics of Jean Harlow; in 1994 the story of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was told twice in Tombstone and also Wyatt Earp; in 1992 the Bicentenary of the discovery of the American continent was covered in two rather variable films about Christopher Columbus (with even one Carry On version!); in 1974 both Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Brothers had the story rights to books about tower blocks on fire, and took the unusual step of combining the two to make The Towering Inferno.

Certainly the nuclear menace was ever present through the 1950s and 60s - so it's understandable if writers and filmmakers got the same idea - and has sadly never really gone away, despite occasional peace accords and climbdowns amongst the more intelligent world leaders. Another curious similarity with Dr. Strangelove is the two films' curious fascination with sexual politics in a world where only a few men may survive. In Kubrick's film the theme is quite explicitly explored, and even in a more seriously minded film like Fail Safe, at a dinner party given by the oily Walter Matthau as Walter Groetescheler (a character roughly based on Henry Kissinger), lectures about the possibilities of survival during annihilation, and one of his glamorous guests (Nancy Berg) is briefly turned on by the idea. Groetescheler is less inclined, for all his sliminess however, and goes about his job, which is to consult the government and the Defence Department about tactics in the Ultimate War.

All the characters, indeed, are going about their everyday lives, which is perhaps what makes Fail Safe so much more compelling, and frightening. One of its other players in this game is Colonel Cassio (Fritz Weaver), a dutiful but edgy officer with family problems at home, underneath his more correct disciplinarian commanding officer General Bogan (Frank Overton). Likewise, the man who is given the job of mistakenly flying the US bomber towards Moscow (Edward Binns) is no gun-ho Slim Pickens type, but a regular fella who "likes" the personal touch.

The main thrust of the story is around General Warren Black (Dan O'Herlihy), suffering from a recurring nightmare involving a matador and the responsibility he holds as one of the key officers within the Pentagon.

As in Sidney Lumet's equally compelling Twelve Angry Men, each of these characters' true nature comes out the more they are pushed to the limit in the face of the horror of accidental nuclear war. What makes Fail Safe such a compelling and plausible scenario is the presence of Henry Fonda as the President - never a more dependable image of Presidential integrity, but even he is potentially outwitted by the mechanics of computers and two over-eager superpowers trying to outfox each other. Through a restrained budget where Lumet uses individual oppressive rooms rather than a generally wider canvas, President Fonda makes his red phone calls to his opposite number Moscow, who is represented only in translation form by a young Larry Hagman, which makes for compelling, taut black-and-white drama that Lumet in particular in the 60s was so good at.

The escalating tension and drama as the negotiations unfold, is the stuff that nightmares are made of. The closing message does little to reassure:

"THE PRODUCERS OF THIS FILM WISH TO STRESS THAT IT IS THE STATED POSITION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE AND THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE THAT A RIGIDLY ENFORCED SYSTEM OF SAFEGUARDS AND CONTROLS INSURE THAT OCCURRENCES SUCH AS THOSE DEPICTED IN THIS STORY CANNOT HAPPEN."