Okay, agreed that that one could never be remade, but I had assumed that already because it WAS in fact, remade on the spot.
When two films are made almost simultaneously and based on similar or the same material (which has happened more than once with books in the public domain) one is not considered a "remake" or the other. But despite the "1964" release dates,
FS and
DS were not really exact contemporaries.
DS was shot in 1963 and scheduled to debut for the holiday season that year, but the studio scrapped the release plans for the politico-military satire after John Kennedy's assassination. The film was released in January 1964 as a result. (A line referring to Dallas was also looped before the final release. A custard pie fight in the war room that Kubrick shot for the ending had already been cut from the film for other reasons, but it surely wouldn't have survived the events in Dallas. When President Merkin slips on some whipped cream and falls to the floor another character says, "Our gallant young president has been struck down in his prime" - not something that would have worked with an American audience in December 1963 or January 1964.)
Fail Safe was shot later and released as planned in October 1964 - nearly a full year after
Strangelove's planned debut.
DS and FS were both made based on the same book: Red Alert. In fact, the producers of FS eventually had to compensate the authors of RA for stealing ideas.
Dr. Strangelove was based on the novel
Red Alert (1958) by a single author, Peter George.
Fail Safe was based on the novel
Fail-Safe (1962) by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler.
Fail Safe was a New York Times best seller and infinitely better-known than
Red Alert. I believe Kubrick tried to get the rights to
Fail Safe first, but either someone had already beaten him to it or the studio he was working with couldn't come up with the asking price. They bought the extremely similar
Red Alert for a lot less. Kubrick began the screenplay adaptatin himself, as a straight drama, but realized a lot of the scenes came out very funny in script form. That's when he brought in Terry Southern to write it as a satire. Peter George was very unhappy about what they did to his book, especially the ending (his was more like that of
Fail Safe), but that didn't stop him from writing a movie-tie-in noveliztion of Terry Southern's script when enough money was put on the table.
So the two films most certainly
weren't based on the same book, and if the producers of
FS paid Peter George any money over alleged similarities between two films based on the same underlying real-world scenario it was probably "get lost" money paid to save the cost of a trial rather than compensation for any genuine theft.
Fail Safe, BTW,
was remade, as a TV movie a couple of years ago. I didn't bother watching it. There are
lots of interesting cameos and early career appearances in both films but...
Oh, and that guy who acted as one of the husbands on "Bewitched": news flash! The guy was an excellent actor. He plays the translator to the president to the Russian government.
?
Been awhile since I've seen
Fail Safe, but I'm pretty sure we never see either the Russian president or his translator, if that's what "translator to the president to the Russian government" means. (Part of the tension of the film comes from the fact that we only see what's happening on our side, and only hear the translation from the Russian side.) If you're talking about the
American president's Russian langauge translator - that isn't
either of the Darrin's from
Bewitched. That's Larry Hagman, later famous as Maj. Tony Nelson on
I Dream of Jeannie and J. R. Ewing on
Dallas. (Although as it happens the late Dick York, Darrin # 1,
was an excellent actor. See his performance in
Inherit the Wind where he manages not to get blown off the screen by the likes of Spencer Tracy, Fredrick March and Gene Kelly.)
Peter Sellers was originally cast in
four roles for
Strangelove, but was having trouble perfecting a Texas accent to his and Kubrick's satisfaction. So Slim Pickens was brought in to play Maj. "King" Kong at the last minute - and indeed was never shown a complete script and played his part entirely "straight".
I've never met a George C. Scott fan who wasn't also a fan of
Strangelove and didn't think it one of the actor's best performances. You know some odd people, hyp. Scott himself has called it his favorite performance.
Strangelove features the film debut of actor James Earl Jones.
In addition to Larry Hagman,
Fail Safe features early work from Dana Elcar (
McGyver) and Dom De Luise (everything Burt Reynolds has ever done.)
Trivia:
The actual "hot line" wasn't a direct telephone hook-up. It was a teletype system. When it was used (which it was several times) the president of the United States would dictate what he wanted to say, see it transcribed into print and then translated into Russian. The English and the Russian translation would then have been sent to Moscow where a Russian translator would re-translate the English and then compare the two Russian versions. The system was designed to
slow down communication, which presumably would force people to take more time to consider their words, provide built-in checks on the translations, and provide an instant transcript of the conversation that both sides could refer to in order avoid misunderstandings.
So some of the most dramatic moments of both films would have been impossible in real life.
Obviously the Peter George novel
Red Alert did not feature the "hot line", which was only actually established following the Cuban Missle Crisis of 1962. But there had been proposals of various kinds for ways to prevent that accidental start of nuclear or conventional war due to military exercises and the like going back to 1958,
including dedicated communications , so the basic dramatic situation was still plausible.
It takes some
(hutspah?) to manage to steal a show away from James Mason.
I think the word you're looking for is "talent" rather than "chutzpah".
Regards,
Joe
