Reviews

The proof that "Capitalism: A Love Story" is a surpassingly stupid movie is evident from its heavy breathing over FDR's abortive "Second Bill of Rights"—which, if the President had but lived to push it through Congress, would supposedly have established economic justice and equality by law. This second Bill of Rights was actually included in FDR's 1944 State of the Union message. Here's his list of proposed new rights: "The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education."

Now of course this is all humbug. However attractive these so-called rights might seem in principle, a government attempting to enact them would soon acquire near-totalitarian powers. And no conceivable government could obtain the necessary data, much less mobilize the wisdom, to make these rights effective. Even in FDR's day, the promise of economic planning was a sad delusion. A national economy on the US scale is simply too large and complex to be managed by government experts and bureaucrats. For these reasons, one would have expected Moore's film to be greeted with hoots of derision. But since, as the French say, a fool can always find a bigger fool to admire him, "Capitalism: A Love Story" was saluted in certain quarters with hosannas and waving palm branches.

Moore proposes replacing evil capitalism with "democracy." And though he's leery of using the precise word, the astute viewer soon grasps his point. Socialism! Socialism will save America from the greedy clutches of corrupt politicians and their sinister corporate paymasters! Okay, so maybe this idea didn't work too well in Russia, China, etc.—but whatever his deficiencies as an economist, Moore understands his audience well enough. He knows that few of them learned any history in school and are largely unaware of the catastrophic results of every past attempt to establish socialism. He also knows that people like to be told what they want to hear—in this case, that they can have all the goodies they want for free if only a "democratic" government existed to provide them. So despite the stupidity of his film, I suppose that I must concede to the filmmaker a certain low cunning.

Moore being Moore, he drives his point home in a typically heavy-handed manner, with the usual collection of sob stories. But while it's tough to lose your house because you can't afford the mortgage payments, that's a relatively minor tragedy compared to a sojourn in the Gulag or a bullet in the back of the neck. I doubt that the pathetic victims of capitalism he parades across the screen could endure living in Cuba, North Korea or Vietnam for even a single day. And that's why Moore's expose of American economic injustice is largely bogus: He measures America against an airy ideological fantasy, a socialist paradise that has never existed and never could exist in this real world of fallible, imperfect human beings.

Grownup people understand all this. Michael Moore, of course, is not a grownup, and his film is merely the power fantasy of an arrested adolescent.

George Pal's "War of the Worlds" shouldn't work, but it does. Transplanting H.G. Wells' Martian invasion from the English Home Counties, circa 1898, to Southern California, early 1950s, seems ill-advised enough. But larding the story with religious sensibility must have set poor H.G. spinning in his grave. The movie's air of can-do American gumption and prayerful Christianity is about as far from the mental universe of the original novel as can well be imagined. One scene even includes a square dance! But no matter: "War of the Worlds" is good, clean sci-fi fun, happily unencumbered by Earnest Messages or Weighty Philosophical Considerations.

My favorite "War of the Worlds" moment comes just before the fighting begins. Observing the Martians' landing zone from a sandbagged bunker, General Mann (Les Tremayne) intones, "They'll probably move at dawn." Never has a film cliché been delivered with such perfect pitch! And sure enough, the fighting begins right on schedule with the incineration by heat ray of the saintly Pastor Collins (Lewis Martin). The troops surrounding the landing zone are routed with great slaughter, and the next thing you know, civilization itself is on the point of collapse. Not even the atom bomb, delivered by the US Air Force's Flying Wing, can arrest the progress of the invasion. In the end, of course, the Martians are defeated—by terrestrial germs, provided courtesy of God's wisdom.

The special effects? Okay, there's nothing special there, but their very crudity lends the movie a certain period charm. The acting? Gene Barry, Ann Robinson and the rest of the cast do well enough in their undemanding roles. Don't expect much in the way of character development—like the SF pulps from which it draws inspiration, "The War of the Worlds" isn't too interested in the inner lives of its characters. It's simplistic, sensational, shallow, wide-eyed, unintentionally funny in spots—and isn't that what we sometimes want in a movie? I'll take this one over the elephantine Spielberg/Cruise version any day.

"Horror of Dracula" is a nicely streamlined film version of Bram Stoker's classic novel. Though the script by Jimmy Sangster takes numerous liberties with the book, it remains faithful to the basics of Stoker's story. Christopher Lee, as the sanguinary Count, locked up the Dracula brand for a generation with his performance in this movie, and I still prefer him to more recent cape-swirlers such as Frank Langella and Gary Oldman. Peter Cushing, as the redoubtable Dr. Van Helsing, shows Anthony Hopkins (who butchered the role of the vampire hunter in the Oldman version) how it's done. The toothsome Melissa Stribling—no quasi-anorexic Hollywood starlet she—plays Mina Holmwood, the would-be bride of the vampire. Ah, those Hammer girls! Though by modern standards there's a high ratio of dialog to action, "Horror of Dracula" moves at a brisk pace. And along the way, it delivers some genuine chills. The graveyard scene in which Van Helsing and Arthur Holmwood confront the latter's sister, Lucy (Carol Marsh), who has been transformed into a vampire by Dracula, is particularly creepy.

Considering that "Horror of Dracula" was made in 1958, it holds up very well today. Christopher Lee went on to portray Dracula in a number of Hammer sequels ("Dracula Prince of Darkness" was probably the best of the lot), but his first outing in the role remains the most memorable of them all. If you're into horror movies and you haven't seen this one—see it.

The trouble with this nuclear slasher flick is that it lets its audience off the hook. Sure, "Threads" is graphic, harrowing, horrifying, etc., etc.—but to what end? Is it telling us anything that we didn't already know? Not really. Just as we didn't need "Psycho" to remind us that stabbing a naked woman to death in the shower is wrong, we don't need movies like "Threads" to show us that a nuclear war would be hideous.

The chief distinguishing characteristic of "Threads" is not, however, its gruesomeness. I could rattle off the names of twenty-odd movies that show bad things happening to good people in even more horrific detail. The thing to notice about "Threads" is its cheap emotionalism. How easy it is, after all, to mow down one's pathetic cast of characters for the edification of one's audience. And how easy it becomes for that audience to develop feelings of moral superiority over the operators of the system that makes nuclear war possible. That it's very hard to come up with a solution to the moral and political dilemmas posed by the existence of nuclear technology is an inconvenient truth that "Threads" prefers to ignore.

Twice while watching "Threads" I was seized by the notion that a member of the audience had somehow jumped into the film. The speech by the female anti-nuclear activist seemed to me a perfect summary of all the irrational sensations that "Threads" aspires to arouse in its viewers. She asks—rhetorically—what the Russians could possible hope to achieve by "winning" a nuclear war. This would have been a good question if somehow it could have been addressed to the Politburo instead of to a British crowd. Later on there was the trade union official, calling for a general strike against nuclear war—as if some sense of solidarity with the British proletariat would have stayed the hand of the Soviet Union. Similar emotions, I note, have been expressed by many of those who have here commented on "Threads."

For my money, "Fail-Safe" (the original from 1964, not the cruddy George Clooney remake for TV) is far superior to "Threads" in its depiction of a nuclear doomsday. The former inspires true pity and terror; the latter merely delivers a series of shocks. The former is about people caught in a tragic situation; the latter is about the body count. Just ask yourself: Which of these two films is really more thought-provoking? The answer, I believe, is obvious—and that's why "Threads" must be judged a failure. It's not asking you to think. Maybe it doesn't even want you to think.

"Fail-Safe" has always been overshadowed by its famous contemporary, "Dr. Strangelove," and most would agree that the latter is a much superior piece of work. Though the plot mechanism that sets the film in motion is really rather implausible "Fail-Safe" has its virtues, including a literate script and some excellent performances.

When the failure of an electronic component results in the transmission of a false attack order to a group of US Air Force nuclear bombers on airborne alert, Soviet jamming prevents the group commander from confirming the order verbally. But the fail-safe system has transmitted what appears to be a valid attack order. So Group Six, with its load of ten 20-megaton hydrogen bombs, heads toward the Soviet Union. Target: Moscow.

The balance of "Fail-Safe" recounts the increasingly desperate efforts by US officials to prevent Group Six from reaching its target. The action takes place in four locations: Strategic Air Command Headquarters (Omaha, Nebraska), the War Room of the Pentagon, the presidential bunker under the White House, and the cockpit of the lead bomber of Group Six itself.

Why does it prove so difficult to recall Group Six? Well, that Soviet jamming prevents SAC from issuing a recall order by voice radio—an order that must be sent within ten minutes. After that, in accordance with standard operating procedures, Group Six will disregard any order transmitted by voice, even if it purports to come from the President himself. The nuclear war planners reasoned that the voices of senior officials and officers could be imitated; therefore, Group Six can only be recalled via the fail-safe system—which has now malfunctioned.

You see the problem. When I watched "Fail-Safe" recently, I found myself asking why there was no provision for a coded verbal recall order. In the real world, this would surely have counted as an extraordinary oversight. Indeed, from what we know of US nuclear war plans, redundancy is hardwired into the system at every point. "Accidental war" of the kind envisioned by "Fail-Safe" was always an extremely remote possibility. (Far more plausible is the premise of "Dr. Strangelove": that a rogue officer in control of nuclear weapons might touch off a war.)

Despite this gaping hole in its plot, "Fail-Safe" succeeds on a number of levels. For the first-time viewer, there is genuine suspense: Can Group Six be stopped? And without doubt, the film's Cold War atmospherics hold the mirror up to nature. In the early Sixties, when "Fail-Safe" was conceived, written and turned into a movie, the bipolar world order seemed immutable and eternal. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was going anywhere, and both were armed with thousands of nuclear weapons. Constantly intensifying superpower rivalry, punctuated by repeated crises, made global thermonuclear nuclear war seem inevitable. "Fail-Safe" is a fitting memorial to that bygone era.

Of the performances, my favorite is Larry Hagman as Buck, the President's Russian translator, who, on the hot line to Moscow, becomes the voice, and assumes the persona, of the Soviet premier. Walter Matthau is also outstanding as Professor Groeteschele, a political scientist and expert on nuclear war who happens to be present in the War Room on the day of the crisis. The familiar character actor Ed Binns turns in a solid performance as Colonel Grady, the commander of Group Six. Frank Overton as General Bogan, the SAC commander, is also a treat to watch. Henry Fonda's portrayal of the President is typically stoic—workmanlike if not particularly inspired.

The weakest performances are by Fritz Weaver as General Bogan's aide, Colonel Cascio, and Dan O'Herlihy as the tragic General Black. Mostly the trouble is that their parts are over-written. Cascio is the obligatory weak link, the man who cracks up under the stress of the crisis; Black is the martyr who must commit the film's final, terrible act. The implausible melodrama of Cascio's crack-up sounds a jarring note that reminds you of the fact that you are, after all, watching a movie. A quieter species of madness was called for here. And General Black? He's a tortured soul from the start—the uniformed apostate who questions the fundamental assumptions of nuclear war strategy. The astute viewer soon realizes that whatever happens, Black is going to be sacrificed. Perhaps if he'd been portrayed as a carefree flyboy, in love with all that technology and less conscious of its ultimate purposes, that sacrifice would seem more heroic. But we rather expect a Christ-like character to be crucified, don't we?

The look and sound of "Fail-Safe" are appropriately gritty—everything black and white, with a soundtrack full of spooky electronic noise. It's interesting to see what counted as cutting-edge technology in 1964: toggle switches the size of your thumb, huge consoles, ticker-tape readouts, stick-drawing Big Board graphics, etc. Owing to the non-cooperation of the Defense Department, the aerial footage is pretty lame. But this is a minor flaw.

Some assessments of "Fail-Safe" are colored by politics—and it's true that the film's scenario and message bear more than a tinge of old-time Ban-the-Bombism. On the other hand, the grotesque anti-military prejudices of contemporary progressivism are absent. The world of "Fail-Safe" is a world in which good men find themselves trapped in an impossible situation. No one can really be called a villain, not even the sinister Groeteschele. Like everyone else, he is a prisoner of history, a bit player in a cosmic tragedy.

"Dr. Strangelove" is a work for the ages; "Fail-Safe" is merely an earnest period piece. Still, for those of us who can remember the coldest season of the Cold War, this film still has the power to send a shiver up the spine.