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FAIL SAFE
August 11, 2013  | By David Bianculli

TCM, 10:30 p.m. ET

 

It’s Henry Fonda Day on TCM, which means good movies almost any time you tune in. That includes, in the evening hours, 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath at 8 p.m. ET, and 1955’s much lighter Mister Roberts at 12:30 a.m. ET. But between those movies, it also means this 1964 thriller, the no-laughs mirror image of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. In Fail Safe, a U.S. bomber pilot heads towards Moscow with a mistakenly “approved” mission to drop a nuclear bomb – and Fonda, as the U.S. President, is superb, when he finally shows up. And so is his interpreter, who helps him read the nuances of his phone call with the Russian premier. The young interpreter is played by Larry Hagman, long before Dallas.

 
 
 
 
 
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