This is Not a Test: Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove

Part of my mind these days is deep in the mud, in sympathy for those unfortunate folks in Montecito, California who’ve endured both fire and rain. (I doubt many of them are looking forward to seeing the film Mudbound.) And another part is frankly terrified by what almost happened in Hawaii, triggered by a false ballistic missile alarm. No harm was ultimately done, except for a lot of jangled nerves among those island-dwellers mistakenly alerted by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency. But in the wake of this very human error—not to mention the currently strained relations between the U.S. and nuclear rogue state North Korea—NPR broadcast an interview that made my skin crawl.

The interview was with William Perry, who for three years served as Secretary of Defense in the Clinton White House. In 2013 he founded the William J. Perry Project, a non-profit effort to spread the word about the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. Perry clearly knows whereof he speaks. During his White House tenure, he was aware of three instances in which a small human error could easily have touched off World War III. In one case, he accidentally uploaded test software in such a way that it seemed like an announcement of a genuine nuclear attack. Fortunately, an alert official caught the error and reversed it without bringing it to the attention of the U.S. president, who’d theoretically have about 5 minutes to decide on a retaliatory missile strike. In Perry’s era, something similar happened in Russia, but the officer in charge was severely reprimanded for avoiding the involvement of the Russian leader. As Perry makes clear, we’re all too vulnerable to the possibility of a spur-of-the moment nuclear decision made by a single individual, one who might not be willing to accept the possibility that an announced enemy missile strike is actually a careless mistake. 

Back in 1964—a nervous time that I remember well—not one but two movies dramatized how the Cold War might heat up as the result of an accidental nuclear strike. Fail-Safe, a thriller based on a popular novel, explored what would happen if a U.S. bomber were accidentally ordered to drop a nuclear warhead on Moscow. This serious and somber film, directed by the great Sidney Lumet, featured an all-star cast, including Henry Fonda as the President of the United States. Advertising posters featured an ominous line: “Fail-Safe will have you sitting on the brink of eternity!”

This was a time when Cold War paranoia was highly visible on movie screens. Along with Fail-Safe, 1964 saw the release of John Frankenheimer’s equally starry Seven Days in May (“United States military leaders plot to overthrow the President because he supports a nuclear disarmament treaty and they fear a Soviet sneak attack.”) But a third 1964 film approached the threat of nuclear disaster in an entirely different spirit. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was loosely based on a British thriller called Red Alert (aka Two Hours to Doom). The British novel was dead serious in positing that a U.S. Air Force general, a victim of paranoid delusions,  might unleash the first strike in World War III. But, given the appearance in that same year of grim films like Fail-Safe, writer-director Stanley Kubrick wanted to try something completely different.  That’s why Dr. Strangelove shocked the American public by turning the threat of nuclear war into outrageous black comedy. 

Dr. Strangelove dared to make fun of scientists, generals, nuclear weapons, and the U.S. president himself. Moviegoing has never been the same since.   

The 2017 National Film Registry: A Study in Black and White

On the day we set aside to commemorate the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, I looked back at the 2017 list of films chosen for inclusion on the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. The list, always announced in the waning days of the year, annually contains the names of 25 films that the U.S. government has pledged to preserve because of their historical, cultural, or aesthetic significance. Predictably the current list contains a blockbuster epic (Titanic), a classic thriller (Die Hard), an innovative aesthetic experiment (Memento), and a sentimental favorite (Field of Dreams). But—at a time when the question of racism has taken on some urgency—I was struck by how many of the selected films grapple with racial and ethnic bias. 

Back in 1947, Gregory Peck and company confronted the prevalence of post-war American anti-Semitism in Gentleman’s Agreement. This Elia Kazan-directed film (one that meant a great deal to my own parents) is on the 2017 list, along with several movies exploring Latino barrio life. But—aptly for Martin Luther King Day—I noticed no fewer than four films that give context to our nation’s struggles with the divide between black and white America.  

It was gratifying to be the one who told Karen Sharpe Kramer that her husband Stanley’s greatest hit, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, had made the list. When this film was released in late 1967, a decade after the first baby-steps of the Civil Rights movement, college-age Americans tended to scoff. For them the story of affluent and liberal-minded white parents (Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn) who eventually give their consent to their daughter’s union with the world’s most perfect black man (Sidney Poitier) seemed much too corny to be of interest. Still, plenty of people, in and out of the Deep South, were outraged. But the movie’s triumph at the 1968 box office seemed to help move the needle in terms of the general public’s reaction to interracial love. A reviewer in the Tulsa Tribune talked about its impact: “What we get is a 1968 reaction to a social question by a range of people representing the full spectrum of possibilities—from the bigot with a totally closed mind to [the] ultra liberal who sees no question. . . . The film could not have been successfully released nationally five years ago; it will be hopelessly out of date five years hence.” 

Also on the 2017 list is Charles Burnett’s raw 1990 drama of black life, To Sleep with Anger. This much-admired indie has been honored by film buffs, and Burnett (now 73) received one of the Motion Picture Academy’s honorary Oscars last fall for his body of work. But as an African-American director he has never had access to the big projects his talents seem to warrant. A more prominent African-American filmmaker, Spike Lee, has a spot on the list too, for his powerful 4 Little Girls documentary (1997) about the 1963 firebombing of a black Birmingham Church, leading to the deaths of four small children. 

I suspect not many people today associate Walt Disney’s charming Dumbo (1941) with racial politics. And my own favorite memory of Dumbo, aside from its literally uplifting ending, is the genuinely phantasmagoric segment known as  “Pink Elephants on Parade.” But there was a time in the 1960s when, as I understand it, Dumbo couldn’t be publicly shown because the “Jim Crow” characters in the “When I See an Elephant Fly” number were taken as offensive black stereotypes. True, they were voiced by a famous all-black choir, but I can’t see them as anything but lovable.

John Manderino: Here There Be Monsters

My 2017 book, Seduced by Mrs.Robinson, gave me the opportunity to praise in print a recent memoir by a Maine-based writer named John Manderino. His Crying at Movies was an inspired comic summation of his own life, with each key episode tied to a movie-going memory. For instance, after his first youthful sexual encounter went badly, he sought performance tips from the lusty Swedes by watching Elvira Madigan. (Alas, it didn’t help.) Then, when he was a lowly college sophomore, a senior asked him out because she adored The Graduate and thought he resembled Dustin Hoffman. Manderino was not flattered. In his mind, “Benjamin was short and looked like a rodent.” Still, he was attracted to the young woman, and so he managed to convince her that he was indeed sweet, sensitive, and depressed, just like Ben. In the next chapter we found them in bed together.

Manderino wrote Crying at Movies in 2008. Eight years later, he published another short story volume, one that pays an eccentric kind of tribute to things that go bump in the night. It’s called But You Scared Me the Most. The title comes from a Randy Newman tune, and the collection riffs on monsters, both those encountered on a movie screen and those who surround us in everyday (and every-night) life. More often than not, we are the monsters ourselves, learning to proudly fly our freak flags, no matter who is watching. There is, for instance, the eleven-year-old boy who celebrates Halloween by turning into a vampire. And, in a delicious story called “Wolfman and Janice,” a suburban housewife joins her spouse by transforming into a werewolf. (By this point, he’s already eaten the neighbor’s cat.)

Some of the stories explore characters who are shaped by their interaction with screen monsters and other grotesques. The Wizard of Oz, Frankenstein’s monster, Boris Karloff as The Mummy, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon all make appearances, as do such long-ago pop culture icons as Kukla (of TV’s Kukla, Fran, and Ollie), a bickering Barbie and Ken, and Señor Wences’ creepily literal hand-puppet, Johnny. In such stories a human character’s response to these famous fantasy figures makes clear to us the challenges and confusions within his (or her) own life. But Manderino also sometimes gets into the head of a fantasy being, like Bigfoot (or – charmingly – an aged Nancy Drew, still struggling to sleuth out things that have gone missing.)

One of the earlier stories, “A Certain Fellow Named Phil,” begins with the first-person confession of a murder. The victim, though, turns out to be an inflatable sex doll. I’m wondering if John saw, and enjoyed, my favorite film on this topic, 2007’s Lars and the Real Girl, then gave his version a more morose ending. The final story of the collection, “The Witch of Witch’s Woods,” captures the eerie uncertainty that was an attraction of The Blair Witch Project. But the most cold-blooded story of the lot, the blandly-titled “Bob and Todd,” may contain nothing menacing at all. In this tale of a hitchhiker picked up along a highway, the driver may or may not be hauling his wife’s body along with a load of athletic shoes. That’s for him to know and his passenger to  obsess about. I can imagine this as a one-act play, something on the order of Albee’s The Zoo Story. Or, of course, it could be the genesis of a very cool and creepy movie.

I’ve never met John Manderino in person, and that’s probably a good thing. I think he’d scare me the most.