![]() He was so impressed by the book that he bought the rights and began working on the script in collaboration with the author, Peter George. Strangelove was something that began for Kubrick as a simple idea about “the widespread Cold War fear for survival.” During his research for the film, he was recommended a book called Red Alert, a somber Cold War-era thriller. The inclusion of twice Oscar nominated Henry Fonda, star of the critically acclaimed adaptation of Grapes of Wrath and Lumet’s debut feature film 12 Angry Men, made the film an (almost) certified hit.Īround the same time, Stanley Kubrick was in the middle of production on the film that would end up becoming, for many, his best and most important work. With the luminary director of A View From The Bridge, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and The Fugitive Kind seemed to give the film Oscar potential and gravitas. ![]() The idea of a simple miscommunication causing a nuclear meltdown played into the fears and lack of understanding that many people felt in relation to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fail Safe 1964 (c) Columbia Studiosįail Safe was designed as a dark, realistic, and terrifying representation of the Cold War era fears of nuclear war. Strangelove and causing it to be seen as a dryer, less effective imitation. This boiled over into a court case that led to a plagiarism settlement, setting Fail Safe’s release eight months behind Dr. But echoing the film’s focus on the rising tensions between the Soviet Union and America, things were quickly becoming heated at the studio that Fail Safe and Dr. Starring Henry Fonda and directed by someone as legendary as Lumet, the film should’ve been a huge hit. Sidney Lumet’s oft-overlooked yet effective black and white drama based on the novel of the same name focuses on an accidental thermonuclear strike on the Soviet Union. The battle of the atomic age parables had begun. At the same time Strangelove was in production, another movie was being made called Fail Safe, and it bore a startling resemblance to Kubrick’s dark satire and its source material. The film was a critical and commercial success upon its release and cemented Kubrick as a directorial force to be reckoned with. The movie follows the ill-fated launch of a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union and the failed attempts to stop it. ![]() The “twin film” cup runneth over once you get to the early ‘90s onwards, but one of the original circumstances of this phenomenon occurred in 1964, with the release of one of the most critically lauded and beloved films of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. For every Babe there’s a Gordy, with every Prestige there’s a The Illusionist, and with each A Bugs Life there’s an Antz. In the end, the film that will be revered as the original is simply the one that’s more successful. Deep Impact came out so close to Armageddon in 1998 that many misremember it as a cheap imitation despite the fact that it was in production at exactly the same time as the Bruce Willis drilling-in-space classic. There’s an interesting phenomenon in Hollywood: films get made to satisfy a timely cultural zeitgeist, causing a glut of movies with the same topics or themes to come out around the same time. ![]()
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