Welcome to a new series on Screen Wolf. With “Hidden Gems & Unsung Heroes” my intention is to give some long overdue attention to some movies and movie professionals that I don’t feel get the credit they deserve. To start, I’m looking at a trio of movies and an interesting phenomenon in cinema.

Over the years occasionally two conceptually similar movies come out at the same time. For example Armageddon and Deep Impact or Dante’s Peak and Volcano. Often this leads to a debate over which is better. Usually the movie deemed inferior or at least less popular ends up buried in the collective memory of our pop culture. On occasion the buried movie is actually really good, but came head to head with a true behemoth of cinema. I want to bring three such movies to your attention. Great movies that are easily overlooked due to an accident of timing.

The Forgotten Three.

The three movies I’m talking about today are: Witness To Murder (1954), Fail Safe (1964) and The Thirteenth Floor (1999). The first of these, Witness to Murder is a film about someone witnessing a murder in an apartment across the road from from their bedroom window. Sound familiar? That movie was released in April 1954, the legendary Hitchcock movie “Rear Window” was released in November 1954. Unfortunate timing. 

Fail Safe was released in October 1964, this is a movie about how a series of tactical errors was going to lead to the accidental nuking of Moscow and the potential retaliation of the USSR to such an accident. Released the same year was Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “Doctor Strangelove or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb”. Strangelove actually came out first, but there is a reason for that. Because of the similarity between Fail Safe and the Strangelove source material (Red Alert by Peter George), there was a law suit that resulted in both films being owned by the same distributor, Columbia Pictures and on Kubrick’s insistence Strangelove was released first. 

No Prize For Second Place.

The final movie is “The Thirteenth Floor” released in may of 1999. This is a movie about people living in an exact replication of our world, but inside a computer simulation…. If you haven’t figured out what movie buried this one in 1999, you probably are on the wrong website. The Matrix came out two months before the Matrix, leaving no space for another film about a virtual reality that isn’t the real world. The movie never stood a chance.

In all three of these cases the movie that buried it was legitimately the better movie, but these are three of the most well known, well respected movies that have ever been made. Coming in second to those is not the worst thing in the world, but all three are good movies, so to be so completely buried is terribly unfair on them and the people behind them. That’s why I want to give them all a quick review and explain what I like about them. Hopefully some of you will check out at least one of them down the road sometime. 

Witness To Murder (1954)

Witness To Murder stars Film Noir legend Barbara Stanwyck as “Cherly Drapper” and George Sanders as “Albert Richter”, a former Nazi and megalomaniac who has everyone convinced that Cheryl is deranged and making things up. Gary Merill plays Lawrence Matthews, a police detective that is torn between believing Cheryl and the lack of evidence to back up her claims. The movie is directed by Roy Rowland from a screenplay by Chester Erskine. 

The most notable difference between Witness and Rear Window comes from the different gender of the protagonist. This changes the entire shape of the story and is in many ways only a story that could work so well in the 1950’s. Cheryl is doubted, accused of making things up and gaslighted into believing she dreamed the murder and was writing notes harassing Richter. At one point Richter even manages to get her committed.

The Edge Of Sanity.

The movie however puts no doubt into the audience’s mind about the murder. Ricther is shown to the audience quite clearly murdering a lady in the opening scene and is shown to be a thoroughly evil main throughout. So the movie is about a regular woman desperately trying to hold on to what she knows she witnessed despite everyone around her telling her she is crazy. While it doesn’t have the advantage of Hitchcock directing it does present some memorable visuals along the way, such as the scene above.

It is a solid Film Noir and as always Stanwyck’s performance was excellent. However, it wasn’t quite up to the combo of James Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece and as a result is largely forgotten. However, it’s different enough to Rear Window to be worth checking out and you can never go too far wrong with a Stanwyck Film Noir. I’d rate it a solid 6.5/10 (Which is a good rating from me).

Fail Safe (1964)

Fail safe was directed by Sidney Lummet and was based on the 1962 novel by the same name (Not as the law suit claimed the 1958 novel “Red Alert”). The main difference between this movie and Strangelove is this is not satire, it is deadly serious the whole way through and very hard hitting. Ultimately though both films make a very similar social commentary, just where Kubrick does it with absurdity, Lummet does it with bitter chilling reality. I can see why Kubrick, as great a director as he was, wanted to make sure his movie came out first. 

The story of fail safe is shockingly plausible. The US have a special bomber patrol that is scrambled should a potential Russian bomber be detected heading into US air space. Should they receive a particular signal they will head straight to Moscow and nuke it, the assumption being that an enemy bomber has unleashed nuclear devastation somewhere in the US. Should this signal accidentally be sent there is a counter signal that will have them stand down providing they receive it within a certain window of time. 

The Greatest Burden.

After a civilian Russian plane strays into US airspace the bombers are launched and due to a glitch receive the signal to head to Moscow. Unfortunately the Russians suspecting the Americans are up to something have jammed communication with the bombers, meaning their fail safe signal cannot get through. This leaves a desperate scramble by the US and eventually the Russians to come up with some solution that doesn’t lead to World War Three.

The last resort they come up with is that the US will nuke New York themselves should they not be able to stop the bombers reaching Moscow. The pilot in charge of that flight is left with the terrible duty of having to murder millions of his own countrymen to save the entire world. It is a very powerful, shocking drama and yet faced with an in form Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers it was buried. This is a very worthwhile film. deserving a solid 7/10. Regardless of how you feel about Kubrick’s masterpiece, this is worth checking out. 

The Thirteenth Floor (1990)

Objectively this is probably the weakest of the films I’m showcasing today. It’s still good though and the ideas behind the movie are interesting. It’s a real piece of science fiction. The virtual world here is not the creation of nefarious machines, but humans. This movie came out years before The Sims game, but there were always life sim type games around. It always seemed a likely scenario that one day there would be a computer generated representation of our world that could be physically visited.

Cyberpunk novels such as Snow Crash and Neuromancer had their own virtual worlds, but these were always part of cyberspace, not attempts to recreate our world. The Matrix and Thirteenth Floor both took this to the next level. While the Matrix frankly opted for style over hard science fiction, the Thirteenth floor has very little style but has an arguably deeper look into the impact of our world being fake.

What If I Told You….

The artificial world in Thirteenth Floor is a bit of a gimmick in itself in that it is based on 1937 and the story actually starts with a murder in the real world. There is definitely an element on Film Noir hard boiled detective story here, which would explain the choice to go with 1937. But despite the gimmick the film looks at what happens when the people realize they are in a simulation and asks the question, what if WE are in a simulation. Is there any reason why a simulation couldn’t itself create a simulation? Unlike in the matrix, these simulated people do not have real life bodies. They can’t just exit their fake world…. or can they? 

The movie is a fun mixture of detective fiction and science fiction. We get a puzzle with twists and turns and we get the big questions about the nature of reality thrown in on top. It’s worth noting the budget for this movie was $16m compared to the Matrix almost $70m budget. It was always going to be trounced in the box office. While the Matrix wasn’t a rip off of this movie, the source novel “Simulacron-3” by Daniel Galouye was almost certainly a major influence on the Washowskis. The Thirteenth Floor isn’t the ground breaking action and special effects masterpiece that The Matrix is, but it does give you more to think about after. It is a high 6/10. Not earth shattering, especially given the competition, but still a recommendation.

Thanks for Reading!