Awards & Honors

Fail Safe was nominated for the UN Award by BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts).

Fail Safe received Laurel Awards nominations for Best Drama and Best Dramatic Performance (Henry Fonda).

Critic Reviews: FAIL SAFE

"...the picture poses a rare problem of showmanship ethics and faith with the public. An earlier Columbia Pictures release, Dr. Strangelove, dealt with precisely the same situation...what remains is how Columbia will exploit and present Fail Safe, which is straight drama as compared with Strangelove being handled in serio-comic fashion. There is the question of whether or not audiences will feel they are looking at the same property, despite its change in treatment -- and having paid good money to do so -- whether they will overlook this fact and accept the new release on its own worth. This is where the question of ethics and studio's faith with its public enter, never before encountered by a studio with two of its own released within a single year. Strangelove was so long in profitable release that the majority of regular picturegoers who might catch Fail Safe very likely saw its predecessor. In any event, Fail Safe deserves to be seen."
- Variety

"Henry Fonda, without any question, is the best thing in Fail Safe. Everybody else is hopeless or helpless. There is nothing in the script, and there was nothing in the novel, to hint to anyone how to behave, how to think, how to be. Fonda plays himself -- as an old-time star always does anyway -- and gets away with it. Between him and the Albert Brenner sets with electronic maps on which the drama and chase and life and death are reduced to little blips, there is a kind of surface tension to the film."
- Newsweek

"Henry Fonda, whether he is a Secretary of State, which he has been twice, or a President, as he is here, makes sane government seem possible and makes credible the melodramatic telephone conversations with the Russian premiere."
- Stanley Kauffman, The New Republic

"Walled up in a white cell somewhere under Washington, President Fonda speaks steadily and carefully in a voice that is intense but curiously flat, as though every word were crushed by a burden of significance too great to bear. And as the voice drones on and on, pleading and reasoning and pleading the figure of the actor slowly swells and charges with tension and importance, the presence of the man becomes the person of mankind and his voice the voice of the species pleading for its life. The whole of history seems consummated in an instant; Armageddon rages in a telephone booth."
- Time

"Though I relished the wit and audacity of Dr. Strangelove, I never felt personally threatened; Fail Safe...makes the logic of catastrophe seem much more intimate and irrefutable. Step by plausible step, we are drawn into an apocalyptic experience."
- Kenneth Tynan, Tynan Left and Right

"While portraying the world's precarious position, Fail Safe only furthers the myth and cruel hypocrisy of our nuclear age. The underlying theme of the story is that man was long ago overwhelmed by events; nuclear energy was preordained to become an all-powerful demon. Therefore, no blame may be affixed for man was impotent in the face of an irresistible force. Yet history illustrates warnings were sounded."
- Michael G. Wollscheidt, in Nuclear War Films, Jack G. Shadeen, Ed.

"Eclipsed by its contemporary, Dr Strangelove, Fail Safe eschews the former's black humour and opts for a deadly serious mix of cold-war melodrama and rampant psychosis...Lumet sensibly avoids pyrotechnics in favour of tightening the psychological screws, as Larry Hagman (the president's translator - nice looking kid) does nervy trade-offs on the hot-line, and everyone, from President Fonda down, starts drowning in a sea of cold sweat."

Compiled by Frank Miller