The Bedford Incident

The Bedford Incident (James B. Harris, 1965) A veritable volume of Bartlett's Quotations fills my head after seeing The Bedford Incident. 

For instance, the astronaut's description of his job as "98% tedium punctuated by moments of sheer terror," and Elwood P. Dowd's "You can be 'oh-so-smart' or 'oh-so-pleasant'—I recommend "pleasant." Then, because the story is basically, "Moby Dick in The Cold War," there are all sorts of Melville quotes...and one bad joke: "Cook 'em, Dan-O."

It's that last one that sticks, though. The Bedford Incident is, basically, a terrible, terrible joke with a possible several mega-tonnage punchline. And director James B. Harris, who, before making this film, was Stanley Kubrick's film-making partner, can't have missed the thought as his ex was making an out-and-out comedy of errors out of the nuclear arms race.  

But where that one took to the air, The Bedford Incident plays out at sea in a cat-and-mouse game between a Soviet nuclear sub and a naval destroyer. In command is Captain Eric Finlander (Richard Widmark, steely with just a touch of baleful twitchiness that goes full-on berzerkoid in an interview), a determined commander who takes enormous pride in the proficiency of his crew, and in the hunt and pursuit of his targets. As an advisor is a former Nazi U-boat commander Wolfgang Shrepke (Eric Portman), who was responsible for the most tonnage (ours) sunk during the second World War. Also on board is reporter Ben Munceford (Sidney Poitier), who serves as an exposition conduit and Royal Pain In The Ass. Among the crew are Martin Balsam as the ship's new doc, James MacArthur as a too-eager ensign, Wally Cox as the sonar bat, and if you're watching early and quickly, there's a young Donald Sutherland as a garbage analyst—garbage being clues to conditions on the enemy boat, and age-analysis gives tracking position and history.

It shows how extreme the measures are on the Bedford, how detail oriented, how precise, how strategic and how puckered the thought processes go into keeping an eye on the enemy. And once found, Finlander will pursue chasing Soviet subs out of territorial waters, even forcing them to stay underwater until they're desperate for air, provoking confrontation. When your Nazi adviser tells you he's scared of your methods, it means you might be going so overboard as to pro-actively lower the life-rafts.

If you're immersed at all in pop-culture, you can see elements of Bedford in such disparate strategy plays as "Star Trek" and The Hunt for Red October. And such gamesmanship is all well and good in limited skirmishes. But, when the arsenal is nuclear? Do you really want a cigarette in a room full of gasoline?  

No, and that the game is played despite the mega-stakes makes the movie and its characters seem not just petty, but a little dim for all the talk of brilliance. The point of hubris is well taken, but the point was better made as an out-and-out black comedy about short-term, selfish interests in the face of global catastrophe.

Fate is the Hunter

Fate is the Hunter (Ralph Nelson, 1964) Continental Flight 22 out of L.A. is bound for Seattle, but it will not make it.

That is not known to Sam McBane (Glenn Ford), who is a Continental air exec in charge of Flight Operations and has a lot of things on his mind. Right now, he's trying to make things go as efficiently as possible; there's a change in regime coming up and a vice-presidency position that McBane is probably going to fill. The thing is Ben Sawyer (Nehemiah Persoff), Director of Engineering and Maintenance, is up for the same job. The last thing he wants to do is banter with his old Korean War buddy Jack Savage (Rod Taylor), who's about to pilot Flight 22, but is thinking about the fishing trip to Walla Walla he's going to make afterwards. Savage has always been a devil-may-care pilot and a bit of a rake, while McBane is a by-the-book man. The two josh a bit, but Savage has a plane to catch. 

Things look normal, and there is the usual banter between the pilots and the stewardesses, one of whom is new and the other, Martha Webster (Suzanne Pleshette), has to warn her about Savage's reputation as a "ladies' man". It's going to be a nominal flight. The control tower gives them the go-ahead and they power up.

But, not too long after take-off, the right engine is struck by birds and flames out. Flight 33 is running on one engine. They radio for emergency landing instructions but there's an issue—three inbound flights are approaching LAX, all off-schedule. That's the last thing Savage and the flight crew here; their radio goes out and right after that, the left engine goes out, too. They're flying without power and have to ditch. Savage goes in for a belly landing on the beach and everything looks clear. Then, at the last moment, they see a pier coming up fast and it's too late. The plane crashes, and takes 53 souls with it. There's only one survivor—Martha Webster.

The crash-site is a melee of fire-fighters, reporters, on-lookers, and Continental execs. It's a disaster and everybody is looking for answers. The pier was supposed to be removed the week before, but the contractor had been off on a hunting trip and hunting was good. Then, the question comes up about sabotage—one of the passengers was a twitchy type who'd bought a lot of insurance before the flight. The Civil Aeronautics Board takes over control of the investigation and they make plans to take the plane pieces back to Continental to put the pieces back together and see what they can find out.

The sabotage angle doesn't pan out. And the right engine turns out to be perfectly alright. Listening to the radio-tapes, everybody sounds concerned but there's no panic. But, then a local reporter starts digging and it turns out that Savage was seen in a bar two hours before the flight and he and his companion seemed pretty lit. McBane protests; he knew Savage, had a log history with him, and sure, he could be a loose cannon but he'd never violate the 24 hour rule. And that's the usual story, isn't it? If you can't find another solution, it has to be pilot error. Blame the pilot. And the rumors seem to back it up.

But, McBane won't hear of it. There has to be another reason. The hell with the promotion. Savage was a good pilot. There had to be something. Something else. McBane starts investigating. First, he goes to the bar where Savage was supposed to be drinking, and the bartender verifies Savage and another guy were there two hours before the flight. One thing tears it: the one guy tipped the piano player to play "Blue Moon." 

It was Savage's favorite tune.

McBane interviews Webster, but she's too much in shock, too grief-stricken to be much help. Savage's landlady thinks he was a jerk. And his ex-fiancee Lisa Bond (an uncredited Dorothy Malone) calls him "the most unreliable, irresponsible and unregenerate man I ever met." There are two clues—the guy named "Mickey" that Savage was in the bar with, and "a Chinese girl" that he'd been seeing recently. 

McBane goes to interview a "Nancy Fraser" whom Savage named as beneficiary on his insurance. He finds a marine biologist (Nancy Kwan) who had been seeing Savage. The two had met while Savage was getting ready to break up with Lisa Bond, and the two were drawn to each other—the insurance, it was for her research. Nancy introduces the concept that it was Fate that caused the accident—given her familiarity with Savage and his very nature that he could not have caused the crash, by design or accident, and that the circumstances combined that the fatal results of the flight were inevitable...and if they were inevitable, there could be no fault.

Her ideas seem to fall in place with what Savage and McBane's old radio-man, Fred Bundy (Wally Cox), reveals about a particular mission from which most of the crew—including McBane—had bailed out. Bundy was too afraid to bail, and, instead of forcing the man to jump, Savage instead began to look for solutions to the dilemma that ultimately saved both men and the plane. Bundy also reveals Savage stayed in touch with him, even after the war and with most of his crew, maintaining friendships and never abandoning them.

The "Fate" theory does not sit well with the CAB, and McBane, out of options and looking for hard answers, decides to take another plane, under the same conditions to find out what happened that forced the plane into its precarious position that even a pilot like Savage could not compensate for. It's only then that he can satisfy himself that there might not be a fault, whether of plane or of man, but that, given the circumstances, it was inevitable.

Fate is the Hunter is by no stretch of the imagination a great movie. The effects are awful, the plane design for the fateful aircraft is something of an aerodynamic nightmare, some of the acting—especially by a hesitant Glenn Ford—is unimpressive*, and there's some amateurishness in the writing throughout—Max Showalter's pain-in-the-ass reporter is as subtle as a club and the final solution (and it is a solution) is, on first blush, a bit of an eye-roller.** But, the movie is, ultimately, a bit marvelous in going against the blame-game of finger-pointing and being simultaneously woo-woo and practical at the same time. Ultimately, it seems to be saying, shit happens and let's make sure it doesn't happen again...or else 53 people died for nothing. That sort of thing just doesn't fly in a litigious society.

The film has nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with Ernest K. Gann's 1961 book (and he was so embarrassed by it that he asked for his name to be removed on television airings, although it appears on the currently available DVD's and on the YouTube version). The film picks up the general philosophy that as pragmatic as one can be, you can't fix everything and every condition and that if one is out of options...well, one is out of options. It's a bit like the test pilots' job description of "eternities of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror." Hey, if you weren't going to take chances, you could have taken a bus. Aviation is, still in all, something of a miracle, and we've only been doing it for slightly more than 100 years. It's amazing that it the industry works as well as it does.

They could make the seats a bit less confining, though.

Rod Taylor ponders that while Susanne Pleshette hands him a fateful cup of coffee.

* Taylor is great in a role that could have made you wince, Pleshette is entirely believable and sympathetic in some of the toughest scenes and the troika of Savage apologists—Kwan, Cox, and Stevens—are endearing.

** Well, except that something similar happened to an Airbus flying from Frankfurt to Cancun in February 2019, causing the flight to be diverted to Ireland.