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."

Field of Dreams (1989)

1989 was a vintage year for film - not quite the cinematic milestone as in 1939, 50 years before, but still pretty impressive - certainly with comparison to later decades where blockbusters have gradually taken over from the more thoughtful films. The likes of Dead Poets Society(qv), Parenthood, Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Calm, and the work of emerging talents like Steven Soderbergh (Sex Lies and Videotape) and Kenneth Branagh (with his new version of Henry V) came to the fore, and were as commercial and highly regarded in their day as the blockbusters; even the blockbusters themelves were pretty impressive and above average too, with the likes of Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade filling cinemas that notable summer.

The "sleeper" hit of the year meanwhile covered slightly more humdrum but richly emotional subtexts. Baseball had re-entered into Hollywood's consciousness in the late 80s, with John Sayles' (no relation) Eight Men Out, and Kevin Costner as a baseball coach in Bull Durham: the former covered the "Black Socks" baseball scandal of the early 1920's, where noted baseball stars took bribes to contrive to fix the World Series. One of these, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, was the subject of W.P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe, about the lost era of baseball heroes whose legacy was tarnished by the Black Socks scandal, but as ghosts of the past were longing for the geater love of baseball itself.

I was frustrated from seeing Field of Dreams throughout 1989 - British distribution of American films in those days was often protracted, or in the case of films with the potentially limited appeal of baseball, never at all (often straight to video as with the excellent The Babe.) General release in the UK came in the late autumn of 1989 and drifted over into the 1990s - where I was watching a professional snooker match at Wembley Conference Centre between Willie Thorne and Dennis Taylor: Thorne was 4 frames to 1 ahead, and with extra time likely to spare for me to squeeze in a bonus visit to a London cinema. Taylor came back however to level the scores to 4 frames all, only to himself let it slip at the last, and for Willie to win the match 5-4, that he could have sealed two hours before.

I managed to get those two hours back however, to see Phil Alden Robinson's fine film at the Ipswich Film Theatre a few months later - always the ideal venue for thought-provoking films.

Robinson had been striving to make a film of Shoeless Joe for some years, and in spite of involvement in another baseball film that year, Kevin Costner was eager and willing to play the film's ideal everyman hero Ray Kinsella, who hears a voice in his Iowa cornfield:

"If you build it, he will come."

Ray himself, the most pragmatic and unsensationalist of individuals (as a photo montage prologue explains), deduces from this mysterious voice that it is something to do with a childhood hero of his late father's, Shoeless Joe. The impact of the message is strong enough to will Ray to build a baseball diamond within his farm (the actual set has now become a tourist attraction), with the help of his understanding wife Annie (Amy Madigan) and their intuitive young daughter Karin (Gaby Hoffman). One indeterminate evening - long after the field has been completed, and Ray has patiently warded off local naysayers including his brother-in-law (Timothy Busfield) - out pops the figure of Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta).

As a fantasy, Robinson plays it commendably straight, and it is this very pragmatic approach, to make the film as a normal drama with an element of the mystical, that makes Field of Dreams so quietly compelling. Shoeless Joe is a lost soul, one of the many lost souls in the American public's eyes since the Black Socks scandal. He and others from the lost era also magically return to the field to take the  chance to play their game once again.

Like Dead Poets Society, it is a film very much about idealism, but a more reflective, older idealism, less a field of dreams than of faded dreams. Many of the participants are idealists whose great moment passed them by, and they never really got their moment to shine.

It is not just for the dead, but also the living: Ray's voices reach out not only to distant baseball players, but their followers too. The essence of baseball, like with many sports, is as much about the fans as the players. One such is a distinguished writer, Thomas Mann (no connection with the German 20th century author of the same name), originally written in Kinsella's novel as John Steinbeck. Mann is, like Steinbeck, a reclusive individual since his heyday of the 1960s. In the imposing but wholesome presence of James Earl Jones, he is also rather embittered for it, a civil rights activist and philosopher from an era in a society that no longer cherishes his ideals. He is in avery way, a lost soul as much as the baseball players that he secretly admires from way back.

But he is also their chorus as well as their audience. The manner in which Jones's character is initially skeptical and even hostile to Ray's idealism then later won over through shared experience, is one of the most compelling characterisations of the film. Especially intriguing is the character's coda, where Shoeless Joe invites Mann himself back into the field. Ray, however, is not invited. It is one of the most benevolent and intriguing "death" scenes ever filmed.

Ray is resentful of being excluded from the field, but there are of course, excellent reasons for this. It is he who has first experienced the voices, and it is he - little though we realise until the end - to whom all the messages were actually intended for.

The film's values are therefore universal, not just for lovers of baseball. It also belies the notion that all ghosts are scary. One such is represented by the lost figure of Archibald "Moonlight" Graham - a player who was selected to play major league baseball but never got his chance to play and spent his time in the reserves dugout. Injury and fate contrived not to allow his big moment on the field, and he retires to become a country doctor until his death in 1972 - the year of The Godfather, as Robinson likes to point out - where Ray suddenly finds himself in a classic Twilight Zone-style moment walking along the street in the town of Burt Lancaster's Dr. Graham.

Graham is more benevolently resigned to his fate: saddened but not embittered. He leaves Ray to his own time and destiny - yet on the way back home, Ray picks up a young hitchhiker (Frank Whaley), by the name of Archie Graham.

In a film of few melodramatic momeents - but often melancholy, whimsically reflective ones - it's most dramatic moment is when little Karin falls down and nearly suffocates. Call the Doctor, Ray immediately thinks - and looks at young Archie.

It also turned to be Burt Lancaster's last cinematic farewell. A worthy final act.