Dr Strangelove, Fail Safe (1964)

My sister wanted to watch a movie so we made it a double feature, two nights in a row. Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was the first night. I'm usually disappointed in Peter Sellers movies, but this was his best work. With George C. Scott, Slim Pickens, Sterling Haden and James Earl Jones. A deranged Air Force general orders a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Only he know the code to recall the B-52's carrying out the attack. The president of the United States (Peter Sellers) calls the Soviet Premiere from the War Room to alert him. British actors playing American characters with very good American accents are common now, but that was a trail Sellers blazed. He also had the title role playing a "former" Nazi scientist who changed his name to Strangelove to sound more American and British Group Captain Lionel Mandrake who kept trying to humor Sterling Haden to get the code to recall the bombers.

One thing that bothered me about the movie was that everyone had a "funny" name. Keenen Wynn played a Colenol named Bat Guano. 

Fail Safe had an almost identical plot. In fact, the author of the novel on which Dr Strangelove was based sued the author of the novel Fail Safe for plagiarism. 

A wing of supersonic Vindicator bombers (actually supersonic B-58 Hustler bombers) are sent to nuke Moscow. Their radios are jammed and they can't recall them until after they've entered Soviet airspace. The pilots were carefully selected to be mindless automatons who would carry out the attack no matter what. The voice of the president calling for them to turn back doesn't matter because the Soviets could imitate his voice, so they bring in the pilot's wife to plead with him but he won't listen to her, either.

The president keeps ordering people to commit suicide. U.S. fighter pilots pursue the bombers, launch their missiles and crash into the arctic ocean. The U.S. ambassador in Moscow is ordered to stand on the room of the embassy and wait for death.

Dom DeLuise's movie debut. With Henry Fonda as the president, Larry Hagman as his Russian interpreter, and Sorrell Booke, with Walter Mattheau in an early role playing an evil professor who keeps arguing for the U.S. to launch an all out war on the USSR, making the same arguments George C. Scott did in Dr Strangelove.