George Clooney’s forgotten remake of his favourite movie
As we get further and further away from the Golden Age of Hollywood, the stars of that era feel more and more like relics of history.
There aren’t many actors working today who embody their spirit, for both better and worse, but George Clooney definitely does. Ever since he burst onto the scene, he drew comparisons to the likes of Paul Newman and Robert Redford for his looks, demeanour, and the way he talks about acting as a craft. As he’s gotten older and put more of his time into directing and producing, those comparisons have only gotten louder.
Clearly a student of the game, as his influence has ballooned over time, he’s taken the opportunity to remake or reboot some overlooked movies of the past, such that Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s series began as a remake of a 1960 feature, where Danny Ocean was played by Frank Sinatra. While those movies turned out to be phenomenally successful, he hasn’t always struck gold in the past, such as his remake of Solaris, which remains a touchy subject.
One example of the latter is 1964’s Fail Safe that saw director Sidney Lumet kickstart his story with a technical fault that orders an American bomber to attack Moscow at the height of the Cold War. If you think this sounds familiar, you’re absolutely right to highlight its similarity to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, to the point there was even a legal battle between the two over alleged copyright infringement.
Fail Safe was vastly eclipsed by Kubrick’s work, which might explain why Clooney took it upon himself to bring it to a modern audience. In 2000, he led an all-star cast in a remake of the film, directed by multi-time Oscar nominee Stephen Frears, opting for a novel approach as opposed to a conventional redo that may have cost the project its place in history.
This live TV version aired as a play in black and white on CBS and was introduced by stalwart news anchor Walter Cronkite, but owing to time constraints, a number of storylines included in the original movie were omitted. Clooney played Colonel Jack Grady, the US officer who receives and obeys the faulty orders to bomb the Soviet capital, which was played by Edwards Binns in the original.
If a version of Fail Safe starring Clooney, Harvey Keitel, Don Cheadle, Hank Azaria, Richard Dreyfuss, and more had been theatrically released, it surely would have been a smash hit. Instead, it was a one-off Sunday TV broadcast that you could only watch again if you bought a DVD, and thus, it had very little staying power and is now almost completely forgotten.
The star has described Fail Safe as one of his favourite films, so it’s a shame that he wasn’t able to do more for its legacy, but it remains an interesting oddity, if nothing else.
