Video: Fail Safe

Herald rating: * * * *

Running time: 85 mins

Rental: August 9

Review: Ewan McDonald

Actors' pet projects can be a worry: John Travolta's Battlefield Earth, Winona Ryder's Girl, Interrupted, Bruce Willis' Breakfast Of Champions and Barbra Streisand's last three movies are a few glaring examples of pictures that didn't ought to have been made.

George Clooney's vanity affair has been to revive live drama on American network television. Only a small screen-big screen star with Clooney's clout could have persuaded CBS to risk almost two hours of a lucrative Sunday night in April on an all-star remake of a 1964 Henry Fonda film about the Cold War.

Just to add to the sense of realism, it would be shot and shown in black and white with no music soundtrack.

To the eternal (in TV terms, anyway) credit of Clooney, British director Stephen Frears, and actors like Richard Dreyfuss, Harvey Keitel, Brian Dennehy, Noah Wyle and Hank Azaria, the dream became reality — the first live drama performance on American TV in 39 years.

Fail Safe was a ratings success, much more than Clooney's infamous live episode of ER. Critics were divided, some saying it was a giant step backwards, others hailing the artistry and bravery. It is, of course, much too daring to see on our channels, though. You'll have to hire the video.

Filmed on two sound stages with 18 different cameras, the stars' busy schedules meant that they were rarely able to rehearse together. When the play went out, the only person to fumble his lines was newscasting
legend Walter Cronkite as he opened the broadcast.

Fail Safe's story asks: what if a computer malfunction sent American bombers to nuke Moscow and, because of military and political bureaucracy, it was impossible to revoke the order?

Over a tense couple of hours American officers and advisers debate possible courses of action in their command headquarters.

Meanwhile the President (Dreyfuss), through his interpreter (Wyle), pleads with his Soviet opposite number to accept it's a mistake — and then pledges to bomb New York to make up for it.

Dennehy plays a square-jawed general who goes from gung-ho to ohmigod; Keitel is all anguish as one of the doves in the war room, facing down Azaria, a hawkish professor. Clooney is the bomber pilot, with Don Cheadle in the seat beside him, closing on his target in the climactic scene, the camera showing the whites of his eyes ...

Video-watchers accustomed to seeing rehearsed performances of multi-million-dollar productions in their front rooms may find Fail Safe a little difficult to get into. Well worth the effort, though.

But don't expect FS2 sometime soon. The experiment may not be repeated and if it was Frears is unlikely to consider it. Another production would leave both him and Clooney in hospital, he said afterwards. "George will be in the lunatic asylum and I'll be in intensive care."