Fritz Weaver

Thieves infiltrate the Metropolitan Museum of Art inside an actual Trojan horse, preparing to steal an entire gallery of paintings, but are apprehended. In the confusion, billionaire Thomas Crown (Pierce Brosnan) - the crime's secret mastermind - steals Monet's painting of San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk. NYPD Detective Michael McCann (Denis Leary) heads the investigation into the theft of the $100 million artwork, with the unwelcome assistance of insurance investigator Catherine Banning (Rene Russo). Banning says that according to McCann, the thieves shut off the AC to drive out the crowd from the museum (but they were themselves among the crowd). Plus, the theory of trying to steal 1000 pounds of artwork (plus 800 pounds of their own weight) doesn't seem plausible with a chopper that has a 600-pound effective load. There is also a mystery of a titanium briefcase that was used to keep open a specific gate of a section from where the Monet was stolen. Banning figures that the Monet section had thermal cameras. When the air was cut off, the temp rose so much that the entire camera feed was wiped off. But the rest of the sections were fine. She then figures that the desk in front of the Monet had 3 legs in the video and only 2 actually. (the 3rd leg was another briefcase placed by Thomas earlier in the day, in which he took the Monet home). Banning reckons that the bench briefcase also had a heater that increased the temp around the Monet more than the rest of the museum. Banning watches as Thomas comes in to identify the perpetrators. She interrogates one of them and figures that they were hired to conduct the robbery by a middleman. They were given schedules and timetables and everything. Banning thinks they were hired to create a diversion. Crown donates a Pissarro to fill the Monet's space in the museum and falls under Banning's suspicion. Banning meets Thomas and tells him that she suspects him of stealing the Monet. Thomas is intrigued and asks her out to dinner. She convinces McCann to begin surveillance of Crown, deducing that the wealthy playboy is motivated not by money but the sheer thrill of the crime. Banning accepts Crown's invitation to dinner. Before the date, Crown's therapist correctly guesses that he has found "a worthy adversary" in Banning. Before dinner Thomas takes Banning to the museum. Banning taunts Thomas by saying that personally she would have taken an irrelevant painting rather than the Monet (and points to the painting of a boat on a lake). At dinner, Banning has a copy of Crown's keys made; she and her team search his home and discover the Monet, which is revealed to be a taunting imitation, painted over a copy of Poker Sympathy from the Dogs Playing Poker series. Banning confronts Crown and the two give in to their mutual attraction, spending a passionate night together. Banning and Crown continue their cat-and-mouse game and their trysts, despite McCann's surveillance. Accompanying Crown on a trip to Martinique, Banning realizes he is preparing to run and rejects his offer to join him when the time comes. Banning is having full blown feelings towards Thomas but continues to look for clues for the missing Monet. After she returns, McCann presents Banning with photographs of Crown with another woman, Anna (Esther Cañadas), complicating her feelings toward the case and her prime suspect. when confronted Thomas maintained that he allowed himself to be photographed with Anna as he wanted to know Banning's true feelings towards him. Banning and McCann discover that the fake Monet is in fact an expert forgery that could only have been painted by someone with access to the original; they visit the likeliest forger in prison, to no avail, although his attitude suggests to them that he recognizes the work. Later, Banning finds Crown packing his belongings with Anna. He promises Banning his interest lies with her alone, stating that Anna works for him, but he would be compromising her to define the nature of their association, and offers to return the Monet, giving her a time and place to meet him when he's finished. Tearfully, Banning leaves and informs McCann. The following day, the police stake out the museum, waiting to arrest Crown. Banning learns that the fake Monet was painted by Anna; the imprisoned forger is her father, a partner of Crown, who became her guardian. Crown arrives but quickly blends into the crowd, aided by lookalikes in bowler hats a la Magritte's The Son of Man. Evading police, Crown sets off the museum's fire sprinklers. His donated Pissarro, hanging in the Monet's place, is washed clean by the sprinklers to reveal the real Monet. Crown's plan is made clear; upon stealing the Monet, Crown had Anna forge the Pissarro over it, and "returned" it to the museum. However, Crown has now vanished with another painting (the one that Banning had pointed to early on), but Banning's employer and McCann consider their case closed as this painting is not covered by Banning's employer. Banning races to meet Crown but finds only the missing painting. Devastated, she sends the painting to McCann, and boards a plane back to London. Taking her seat, she finds Crown sitting behind her and the two are passionately reunited.

A stern and tyrannical father named Stan (Tom Atkins) gets angry when he finds his young son Billy (Joe Hill) reading a grisly horror comic book entitled "Creepshow". After arguing with his wife (Iva Jean Saraceni) and slapping Billy, Stan throws the comic in the garbage. A skeletal figure appears outside Billy's window, the Creep, who hosts the stories in the comic book. A wind draws the comic out of the garbage can, and the five stories within come to life, dissolving from illustrated comic frames to live-action frames at the beginning of each story, and vice versa at the end of each story (each story is linked by short, animated interludes). 1st story: "Father's Day" -- The Granthams are a wealthy family with a macabre annual celebration. Sylvia Grantham (Carrie Nye) gathers with her family members Richard (Warner Shook) and Cass (Elizabeth Regan), and the eccentric Aunt Bedelia (Viveca Lindfors) on Father's Day. While they are waiting for Bedelia to arrive, the family members explain Bedelia's back story to Cass's new husband, Hank (Ed Harris). It seems that Bedelia's father, the now-deceased family patriarch Nathan (Jon Lormer), was pathologically jealous of Bedelia. After Nathan had her lover murdered in what was written off as a "hunting accident", Bedelia went over the edge. While caring for the elderly Nathan, Bedelia snapped and bashed Nathan's head in with a marble ashtray. The family conspired to make it look like an accident, and Nathan's massive wealth was divided among them equally. Ever since the time of the murder, which occurred on Father's Day, Bedelia visits her father's grave at the family estate, then joins the others in the mansion for dinner. This year, as Bedelia sits on Nathan's grave, Nathan's rotting corpse (John Amplas) emerges from the ground and attacks her, strangling her to death. Nathan then exacts revenge on the rest of the family. Hank is squashed with a falling gravestone, the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Nann Mogg) is killed, and Nathan twists Sylvia's head off of her body. In a final gruesome joke, he 'surprises' Cass and Richard with Sylvia's head, decorated to look like a Father's Day cake, complete with burning candles. Story #2: "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" -- Jordy Verrill (Stephen King) is a simpleton who lives alone on his family's rundown farm. A meteor crashes to Earth, landing in his field, and Jordy has aspirations to sell the meteor to the local college for a small fortune -- two hundred dollars. He tries to pick up the meteor but it's too hot, and burns his fingers. Jordy's solution is to pour a bucket of water on it, but that causes it to split in two. A dejected Jordy sees his dream of a two hundred dollar windfall go down the drain. Still, he resolves to try and sell the halves, which are now covered in a greenish liquid. Later that night, the crater where the meteor landed is now covered in weird green plant life, as is everything the meteor came into contact with. Jordy notices his fingers have green wounds on them, presumably from the burns, but later he discovers the alien vegetation, which has now covered the entire farm. Jordy realizes that the alien plant life is now growing on his skin. As the night progresses, Jordy becomes covered in shaggy green weeds, causing him to itch. Jordy's itching skin causes him to run a bath, but before he can get in, the image of his deceased father (Bingo O'Malley) appears to him in the mirror and warns him against getting into the water, since the water is what makes the weeds grow. Jordy gets in anyway, and when morning dawns, Jordy has become a gigantic lumbering mass of alien vegetation. Desperate, he shoots himself in the head with a shotgun, revealing that the deep green weeds have even penetrated his brain. Afterwards, a radio announcer is heard forecasting heavy rainfall, suggesting that the extraterrestrial plant growth will further spread to surrounding areas. Story #3: "Something to Tide You Over" -- Harry Wentworth (Ted Danson) is awakened by a knock at his door from Richard Vickers (Leslie Nielsen). It seems that Harry has been having an affair with Richard's wife, Becky (Gaylen Ross), and Richard has come to confront him. Instead of attacking him, Richard plays him a cassette of Becky's terrified voice begging Harry for help. Harry accompanies Richard back to his private beachfront estate, where Richard forces him at gunpoint to climb into a hole in the sand on the beach. Burying Harry up to his neck, Richard then connects a television that displays live footage of Becky, also buried up to her neck in another location on the beach. The tide is already starting to come in and wash over her face. Harry realizes that they will both be dead soon; there is no reasoning with Richard, who seems to take great delight in his revenge. Richard abandons Harry and goes back to his beach house, where he watches the drowning deaths of both Becky and Harry on the video monitors. Before the last wave covers Harry's head, he vows revenge on Richard. Later that night, Richard is alone in the beach house when he seems to hear voices calling him. While he showers, two shuffling figures enter his home, defying the many security cameras and alarms that Richard has in place. When Richard emerges from the shower, he hears somebody in his house and immediately thinks it's Harry, somehow still alive. He is terrified to discover that the invaders in his home are the water-logged corpses of both Becky and Harry, both of them zombies covered in seaweed with green, pruning skin. Richard's gun has no effect; the zombies taunt him the same way he taunted them, and we finally see Richard, now completely insane, buried on the beach in the same way, waiting for the tide to come in. "I can hold my breath a looooooooooong time!" Richard yells crazily. Story #4: "The Crate" -- A janitor at Horlicks University, Mike (Don Keefer), discovers an old dusty crate behind a grate under a basement stairwell. He calls Professor Dexter Stanley (Fritz Weaver) to investigate with him, drawing him away from a stuffy faculty gathering. At the gathering is Dexter's good friend, Professor Henry Northrup (Hal Holbrook). Henry is married to an obnoxious shrew of a woman named Wilma (Adrienne Barbeau). Wilma, who is continually drunk, embarrasses herself and Henry at the party, and it seems as if she is about to ruin the friendship Henry shares with Dex. Henry, who is somewhat meek, fantasizes about ways to murder her. Back at the university, Dex and Mike pull the crate out from under the stairs and realize that it appears to have been under there since the late 1800s. A stamp on the outside of the wooden box indicates that it contains specimens from an arctic expedition. When the two of them open it, they sense movement from inside, and Mike is attacked by something when he puts his arm in the crate. Whatever it is pulls Mike inside, apparently eating him as it goes, and Dex catches a glimpse of a horrible, shaggy beast with huge teeth. Dex runs blindly from the lab and finds the only other person in the hall, a student named Charlie Gereson (Robert Harper). Charlie goes down into the the laboratory and finds it covered in blood, with no sign of the crate or the creature. Charlie and Dex find the crate back under the stairs, and when Charlie attempts to investigate, the creature attacks him and eats him, too. Dex is afraid to go to the police; instead he goes to Henry's house, and he arrives while Wilma is away for the evening. He tells Henry the story about the creature, and Henry knows Dexter has to be telling the truth. Henry hatches a plan. He gives Dex sleeping pills and leaves him locked in his study, asleep. Henry writes Wilma a note, concocting a bogus story designed to lure her to the laboratory. He gets there ahead of her and cleans up the evidence of the blood. Wilma can't resist Henry's trap, and she shows up at the university as planned. Henry lures her under the stairs and her obnoxious ranting draws the creature out of its crate. It eats Wilma before Henry's eyes; Henry then chains it inside the crate and dumps the crate into the deep water of a nearby quarry. When Dexter wakes up the next day, he and Henry vow to keep the secret of what really happened, and let the authorities deal with the disappearances. The final frames show the creature in its watery trap, tearing the crate to pieces and presumably escaping. 5th and final story: "They're Creeping Up on You!" -- Upson Pratt (E.G. Marshall) is a neurotic business tycoon who lives in a sterile, white penthouse apartment atop a skyscraper in a major city. He communicates with the outside world via the telephone, treating his employees and subordinates in a cutthroat, heartless manner. One phone caller informs him that an employee, Norman Castonmeyer, has committed suicide because Pratt fired him. Pratt seems delighted rather than upset. Pratt is obsessed with cleanliness and has a huge phobia of bugs. Unfortunately, he keeps finding cockroaches in his apartment, which sets him on a rampage to correct the situation. He places telephone calls to the building superintendent (David Early) and makes thinly veiled racial slurs in an attempt to intimidate the man. As Pratt finds more bugs in his apartment, someone gets through on his private line. Norman Castonmeyer's widow, Lenore (voiced by Gwen Verdon {credits say "Ann Muffly (voice) (uncredited)"}), calls Pratt to curse him for her husband's death. Pratt is amused by her melodramatic sadness, until the cockroaches multiply. He finds them in his food processor, bits of them surfacing in the grain cereal he eats. An electrical blackout occurs, and the roaches attack, swarming by the thousands everywhere in Pratt's apartment. Pratt retreats to his "safe room", a climate-controlled sleep chamber, just as the phone rings. Lenore Castonmeyer's voice curses him over and over "I hope you die! I hope you die!", and Pratt discovers his bed swarming with roaches. The roaches quickly cover him and Pratt suffers a heart attack. The power returns, the lights come back on, and the roaches are nowhere to be seen. Pratt's body lies inside the glass sleep chamber. The superintendent knocks at Pratt's door and laughs when Pratt doesn't answer, asking "Bugs got your tongue?" Suddenly, swarms of roaches burst from Pratt's body, so many that they nearly fill the glass chamber. The wraparound story with Billy concludes the next morning, when two garbage men (Marty Schiff and Tom Savini) discover the comic book next to the trash can in front of Billy's house. They leaf through it reverently and discover that someone has clipped a mail-in coupon for a genuine Haitian voodoo doll. Inside the house, Billy's father, Stan suddenly suffers neck pain, while up in his bedroom, Billy stabs a voodoo doll in his form of his cruel father repeatedly with a pin as payback for Stan tossing out his favorite comic book. Like each story in the comic book, this live action scene of Billy stabbing the voodoo doll becomes an illustrated comic book picture, and as the camera pulls back, we see that the comic's macabre "host", "The Creep", is holding the second issue of the "Creepshow" comic book in his boney hands, with Billy and his voodoo doll adorning the cover. The Creep titters, and a nearby candle flame goes out, plunging the scene into darkness. Credits begin to roll... (At the end of the credits, we once again hear The Creep's laughter).

On November 12, 1975, Dahlia Iyad (Marthe Keller) arrives at the airport in Beirut, Lebanon. Taking a taxi into town, she walks through narrow alleys and bazaars, then slips into the back seat of a waiting car. The vehicle takes her to a gated compound, where she meets Nageeb (Victor Campos), a Palestinian co-conspirator. He shows her a secret film of an American prisoner of war named Mike Lander (Bruce Dern) confessing his war crimes to his North Vietnamese captors. Nageeb admonishes Dahlia that she's built an upcoming mission around Lander who is obviously unstable, but Dahlia insists she can control him. Dahlia tells Nageeb to destroy the film because it could compromise her mission. Confident that her plan will succeed, Dahlia records an audio statement on behalf of her guerrilla group, Black September, telling the American people that it's time for them to pay for aiding Israel's repression of the Palestinians. That night, Israeli commando Major David Kabakov (Robert Shaw) leads a strike team against the compound. When Kalakov enters Nageeb's room and kills him, he finds Dahlia taking a shower in the adjoining bathroom; however, he assumes she's Nageeb's mistress or a local prostitute and doesn't shoot her. Kabakov's men gather evidence, including Dahlia's tape recorder, and escape the compound before blowing it up. On November 14, Mike Lander is piloting a Goodyear blimp above a football game at the Coliseum in Los Angeles, California. The head of the television crew is angry because Lander can't get the blimp and its overhead camera in the right spot. But Lander brushes him off, knowing that no other pilot would even try to fly a dirigible in the high winds that day. On November 17, in Washington, D.C., F.B.I. agent Sam Corley (Fritz Weaver) is called to the Israeli embassy to hear Dahlia's tape. Kabakov tells Corley that Dahlia's wording indicates that Dahlia's message was not a warning but rather a justification to be heard after a planned terrorist attack. He suspects the attack is planned for January. Kabakov recognizes Dahlia as the woman he saw in the shower, but he has no idea who she is. Meanwhile, Dahlia goes to Lander's apartment in Los Angeles. Lander is an emotional wreck because Dahlia hasn't contacted him in three days and he thinks she's betrayed him. Dahlia calms him with a gift-a statuette of the Madonna made of an explosive compound that he needs for his project. Dahlia encourages Lander to pull himself together and go to his Veteran's Administration rehabilitation meeting, so that he won't lose his piloting job with Goodyear. Later that day, at the V.A., Lander reveals his bitterness. Despite his heroism and years as a P.O.W. in Vietnam, the Navy turned his wife against him and took away his commission. On the night of November 23, Lander and Dahlia unload wooden crates from a freighter in the Long Beach harbor when a Coast Guard cutter approaches. Since Lander's speedboat is faster and smaller, he's able to evade them by running under a low bridge, but the Coast Guard reports the clandestine activity to the F.B.I. The freighter captain tells Corley that he knows nothing about the incident, but when Kabakov and fellow Israeli agent Robert Moshevsky (Steven Keats) sneak aboard the ship that night and threaten to slit the captain's throat, he confesses that his crew delivered 12 crates to a man and a woman in masks. Just then, the phone rings, and when the captain answers it, the receiver explodes, killing the captain and injuring Kabakov. When Dahlia sees Kabakov on television being carried into the emergency room of a local hospital, she disguises herself as a Catholic nurse, breaks into the hospital drug room and fills a syringe with potassium chloride. However, Moshevsky spots her before she can get into Kabakov's room and demands that she accompany him downstairs to the nurses' station for identification. On the elevator Dahlia jabs the needle into his neck and kills him. As soon as Kabakov gets out of the hospital, he goes to the office of Muzi (Michael V. Gazzo), the local importer in charge of Lander and Dahlia's shipment. Holding Muzi at gunpoint, Kabakov learns that the shipment was plastic explosives, the woman called herself "Kaza" and the man who paid him was an Egyptian in Tripoli named Mamud al Bernardi. On December 3 , Lander and Dahlia land a small plane at a desolate Mojave Desert airstrip to test an explosive device he's designed for the mission. Lander gains the confidence of the airstrip's sole caretaker and kills him by firing off hundreds of "steel rifle darts"-pieces of shrapnel-in one symmetrical blast. Ecstatic with his success, Lander tells Dahlia that 200,000 darts could cause significant damage if they were detonated 100 feet above the fifty-yard line of a football game from the Goodyear blimp. Back in Washington, D.C., Kabakov has a secret rendezvous near the Lincoln Memorial with an old intelligence rival, Egyptian Colonel Riaf (Walter Gotel), and convinces him that it's in both of their interests that he find out who Kaza is. When the men meet again days later, Riaf has a photograph of Kaza and reveals that her real name is Dahlia Iyad. Riaf explains that Dahlia was born in Haifa (then Palestine) to an Arab father and German mother, and Israeli commandos killed the men of her family and forced her mother, sister and Dahlia into refugee camps, where only Dahlia survived. A few days later, Dahlia hauls a speedboat-shaped trailer into Miami, Florida, and parks it in a locked storage area. When she checks into the downtown Hotel Edward, Palestinian agent Mohammed Fasil (Bekim Fehmiu) greets her with news that the Israelis have found out who she is. Although Fasil wants her to abort the mission and go into hiding, she refuses, insisting it's already too far along. On January 1, 1976, Corley and Kabakov are alerted that Dahlia has been spotted in Miami, but by the time they arrive, she has already driven back to Los Angeles and only Fasil is at the hotel. Before F.B.I. agents can apprehend Fasil, he shoots his way out and wages a running gun battle through the city until Kabakov kills him on the beach. When Kabakov and Corley search Fasil's hotel room, the commando holds up a magazine with the Miami Orange Bowl on the cover. The two hurry to the Orange Bowl and try to convince stadium authorities that they need to cancel the upcoming Super Bowl X football game to be held on January 18, but the authorities refuse and claim that the President has arranged to be at the event. Although security is enhanced and all flights over Miami during the Super Bowl are canceled, police helicopters and the Goodyear blimp are allowed to fly overhead. On January 17, the day before the game, Lander's mission is stymied when Goodyear replaces him with another pilot named Farley (Tom McFadden). Assuring Lander that he needn't worry, Dahlia goes to Farley's hotel room, kills him and puts a "Do Not Disturb" sign on his door. The next morning on January 18, Lander joins his crew and tells them that Farley is sick. At the airfield, the men prepare the blimp, lift off and head for the stadium. During the game, Lander starts a fire in one of the engines, which provides him with an excuse to hurry the blimp back to the field and fix it. Dahlia is waiting there with the trailer and helps to hook up Lander's contraption to the underbelly of the blimp's gondola, claiming it's a last-minute request from CBS-TV. However, one of the television crewmen becomes suspicious and runs back to the CBS remote trailer. Lander follows the man and shoots him. Meanwhile, the police find Farley's body at the hotel and alert the authorities that the blimp is the terrorists' weapon. Lander and Dahlia use automatic weapons to kill the men on the blimp airfield, including several policemen and an F.B.I. man, then head back toward the stadium, dumping the gondola's equipment to offset the added weight of the shrapnel. Kabakov and Corley commandeer a police helicopter and follow them, using the gondola's limited visibility beneath the blimp to avoid detection. Lander pilots the blimp with the bomb towards the Orange Bowl stadium while Dahlia provides covering fire as she opens fire and shoots down a police helicopter, and forces unarmed civilian media helicopters to back away. Dahlia opens fire on the helicopter containing Kabakov and Corley when it comes into view, slightly wounding Corley when he tries shooting at the blimp with a rifle. As Kabakov and Corley swoop down next to the gondola for another pass, Kabakov opens fire with his sub-machine gun, killing Dahlia and wounding Lander, but it's too late to stop the blimp. Using the helicopter's cargo hook line, Kabakov slides down onto one of the blimp's rear tails and connects it to the helicopter in time to pull the dirigible away from inside the stadium and toward the nearby ocean. In his final moments, Lander lights a backup fuse to detonate the bomb. Moments after the helicopter lifts Kabakov free from the blimp, Lander's invention explodes in a ball of fire, spraying the ocean surface with shrapnel. With 80,000 lives saved, the helicopter flies back toward Miami.

Thomas "Babe" Levy (Dustin Hoffman) is a history Ph.D. candidate and avid marathon runner researching the same field as his father, who committed suicide after being investigated in the Communist witch hunts of the Joseph McCarthy era. Babe's brother, Henry James Levy (Roy Scheider), known only as "Doc", poses as an oil company executive but in fact is a U.S. government agent working for a secret agency headed up by Director Peter Janeway (William Devane). Babe is not aware of his brother's true occupation. Doc is often supposedly out of the country on business for extended periods of time, but comes to New York under the guise of a visit to Babe. The brother of a Nazi war criminal possesses a safety deposit box key, but is killed in a traffic accident (after a road rage altercation with a short tempered middle-aged Jewish American motorist). Doc suspects that the criminal, Dr. Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier) will be arriving to retrieve an extremely valuable diamond collection. Szell later sends a burly assassin named Chen (James Wing Woo) to kill Doc in his Paris hotel room, but Doc fights the hit man and breaks his back. Babe enters into a relationship with a young woman named Elsa Opel (Marthe Keller), who claims to be from Switzerland. One night while out on a date Elsa and Babe are mugged in a park by two men dressed in suits. Some time later, Doc takes the couple to lunch, where he tricks Elsa into revealing that she has been lying to Babe about her background. Though Doc suspects she may have some connection to Szell, he tells Babe only that she is seeking an American husband so that she can become a U.S. citizen. After Szell arrives in America, Doc meets him to tell the former Nazi he is not welcome in the country, and also to warn Szell to stay away from Babe. Szell casually accepts the pronouncement, but then swiftly knifes Doc, wounding him severely. Doc is able to make it back to his brother's apartment, but collapses and dies in Babe's arms without telling him anything. The police interrogate Babe for hours, until government agents led by Peter Janeway arrive. Janeway asks Babe what Doc told him before he died, and informs Babe of his brother's career as a U.S. government agent. Babe insists that his brother did not tell him anything, but Janeway feels that Doc struggled all the way to Babe's apartment to give him vital information of some kind. Babe is later abducted from his apartment by Szell's henchmen, Karl and Erhardt (the two men from the park). In an infamous sequence, Babe is tortured by Szell, a skilled dentist, who repeatedly asks "Is it safe?" Confused by the question code phrase he does not understand, Babe denies any knowledge, but is tortured. The dentist offers him oil of cloves, an anesthetic, as positive inducement to cooperate. Eventually, Babe loses consciousness and Szell pauses his torture. Babe is then rescued by Janeway, who apparently kills Szell's bodyguards and takes Babe from Szell's hideout. As he drives, Janeway explains that Szell is in America to sell off his large cache of diamonds, which he had taken from Jews he had exterminated at Auschwitz during World War II. Janeway continually presses Babe about Doc's dying words, but Babe again insists he knows nothing. Frustrated, Janeway reveals himself as a double agent working with the Nazi criminal all along, and he turns Babe over to Karl and Erhardt (Janeway had only faked killing them). As it turns out, Szell is one of Janeway's highest level informants, and had informed on other Nazi war criminals in return for immunity. Delivered back into Szell's hands, the Nazi criminal has a curiously kindly conversation with Babe before calmly explaining why he is holding Babe for questioning. Szell suspected that Doc would attempt to rob him of his diamonds, or rat on him to authorities; thus his desire to know if it's "safe" to withdraw the diamonds, i.e., whether Doc told Babe any incriminating information. Still unable to extract anything from Babe, he proceeds to drill into one of Babe's healthy teeth. Babe eventually escapes again, this time on his own, with Janeway and Szell's two henchmen giving chase in a car. Though exhausted and barefoot, he is able to outrun his pursuers in part by remembering famous "marathon man" Abebe Bikila, who ran barefoot. After inviting a neighborhood acquaintance and his toughs to break into his apartment and steal his pistol (the same pistol his father used to commit suicide), Babe phones Elsa, who agrees to meet him with a car. She drives him to a country home as a hideout. Babe guesses that she has set him up; she confesses that Szell's dead brother owned the home, and that she was one of Szell's couriers. Janeway and Szell's men arrive, but Babe avoids an ambush by taking Elsa hostage. In another twist, Janeway kills Szell's men and offers to let Babe kill Szell in revenge for Doc's death if Janeway can have the diamonds. Babe agrees, but as he leaves to find Szell, Janeway attempts to shoot Babe, but kills Elsa instead when she tries to alert Babe. Angered, Babe guns down Janeway. Back in New York, Szell attempts to determine the value of his diamonds. However, he chooses an appraiser in the Diamond District in midtown Manhattan, where many of the shop owners are Jewish. A shop assistant who is also an Auschwitz survivor believes he has recognized Szell as a wanted Nazi criminal. After Szell hurriedly leaves the shop, an elderly Jewish woman also recognizes him, but passersby think she is senile. Trying to cross the street to get closer to Szell in order to expose him she is hit by a taxicab, causing a crowd to assemble to assist her. Amidst the confusion, the shop assistant appears again, directly confronting Szell. Becoming increasingly paranoid, Szell slits the man's throat with a retractable blade concealed in his sleeve. Szell retrieves his diamonds from the bank, but is taken hostage by Babe as he attempts to leave, who inconspicuously forces him into Central Park and into one of the pump rooms at the south end of the Reservoir. Babe holds Szell at gunpoint on a scaffold and seizes the diamonds; rather than kill Szell, Babe informs him that he will allow Szell to live and keep as many diamonds as he can swallow. Szell initially refuses, prompting Babe to begin throwing the diamonds into the water below them. Szell relents and swallows one diamond, but then refuses to cooperate further. Szell goes on to insult Babe, and after he spits in Babe's face, a fight erupts in which Szell tries to stab Babe. Babe throws the remainder of the diamonds down the scaffold steps towards the water; Szell dives for them, but stumbles, and fatally falls on his own knife blade. Picking up his gun, Babe exits the pump room and heads out into Central Park. Stopping by the Reservoir, he throws the gun into the water.

Warren Black lives in New York City and suffers a recurring nightmare about attending a bullfight that ends in a piercing shrieking noise. The nightmare fills him with doubts about his job as a Brigadier General in the US Air Force who is assigned to nuclear weapons. Walter Groteschele is a professor with some audacious ideas about nuclear warfare - namely that the common conception that any exchange of nuclear weapons will inevitably and imminently lead to an all-out exchange and the annihilation of the world is wrong. He is a civilian advisor to the Defense Department and Defense Secretary Swenson. Frank Bogan is commanding general of Strategic Air Command, the nuclear weapons arm of the Air Force, and he possesses faith in the vast array of high-tech equipment at his disposal, enough that he leads a short-notice tour of a visiting Congressman, Hubert Raskob, of SAC headquarters - though he must roust his executive officer, Colonel Warren Cascio, from an unplanned visit with his elderly father, a drunken hillbilly who lives in a basement apartment and whose alcoholism periodically leads to violence. Jack Grady, a Colonel in the Air Force, leads Group Six, a squadron of Vindicator nuclear bombers, supersonic jet aircraft derived from the B-58 Hustler bombers of the latter 1950s and based near Anchorage, AL. Grady and his wingman Billy Flynn debate the utility of their fellow pilots, young men who seem more like machines than the pilots they flew with in the Second World War. All of these men are soon caught up when a computer malfunction at SAC headquarters results in replacement of a faulty control piece. The replacement is routine but momentarily freezes up SAC's mainframe as the array of computers reboots. It appears of no concern - except the glitch activates the Fail-Safe box aboard Group Six; at the same time all radios aboard Group Six are jammed by Soviet Russia, and when the fail-safe signal aboard the planes is verified, it leaves Grady and his men thinking that nuclear war has broken out and they must execute their final order - penetrate Soviet Russia from the North Pole and launch multi-megaton explosives onto Moscow. The President Of The United States now must become involved as he and his translator, Peter Buck, travel deep underground to the White House command bunker, where a "Hot Line" direct voice communicator with the Soviet Premier awaits, with Buck hearing the Russian's voice and translating his words to the President. The President, the Secretary of Defense, and General Bogan work to try and stop Group Six, but the power of the planes and the crews' unshakable working orders - orders that include disregard of all outside voice communication on the suspicion of enemy disinformation - means that the six bombers penetrate Soviet Russia and overcome the Soviet Empire's vast antiaircraft grid. Making matters worse, when The President innocently asks the Soviet Premier about jamming of Group Six's radios, the Russian initially lies about it, and when he finally tells the truth the President still cannot convince Group Six to disengage. A direct communication link to Soviet air defense headquarters is opened and General Bogan is forced to dragoon one of his technical sergeants into telling the Russians how to detonate nuclear-armed air-to-air missiles, thus blowing up their own planes. With all indications being that the bombers will reach Moscow, the President makes a deal with the Soviets - a deal so stunning as to shake even the Soviet Premier into realizing that the President's pleas that the attack is an accident are manifestly the truth, but with the sickening realization that the President's proposal is the only way to avoid omnicide.