And the scuzzy ambulance driver who gets blown away at the end of “Mother, Jugs and Speed.”
The movie was great and fairly true to the book, but DeLuise’s performance just struck a jarring note for me. He played the AF Master Sergeant who tells the General in the War Room “The Bloodhound [AA missile] has both infrared and radar-seeking capability.”
In the book, the Sergeant is a big, kind of dumb lifer who’s all too happy to provide the information the General needs, and is seemingly oblivious to what’s really happening: they’re going to use the information to shoot down other American servicemen. In the movie, DeLuise plays him as a whiny, kind of faggy Sergeant who all too readily realizes the consequences of his actions. Whereas in the book he automatically follows orders with a silly grin on his face, in the movie they pretty much have to pry the information out of him.
Not at all what I was expecting, certainly, and I almost laughed out loud when I saw it.
The whole point of the book Fail-Safe being, of course, that if there ever were a situation where a nuclear strike was ordered by accident, American service personnel were conditioned to err on the side of action, rather than caution.
Not only that: They’re going to give it to the Russians so that they can shoot down other Americans. A hundred million zillion gajillion times more heinous a crime! :mad: