Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb ***** (1964, Peter Sellers, George C Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Peter Bull, Slim Pickens) – Classic Movie Review 209

Based on Peter George’s serious thriller novel Red Alert, Stanley Kubrick’s chillingly hilarious 1964 satire from the terrifying Sixties Cold War era seems as brilliant and relevant as ever. A doomsday black comedy about the horror of nuclear war, it’s one of Kubrick’s most daring, valuable, and timeless films.

Kubrick was working on the thriller screenplay when he realized some of his writing was funny, so he hired writer Terry Southern (The Magic Christian) to help him turn it into the dark satirical comedy it is now. They added all the daft character names: Kissoff, Turgidson, DeSadesky etc. A bit silly and juvenile, maybe, for such a big topic, but funny anyway. Peter George was not amused by his novel’s treatment, though he is co-credited for the screenplay.

Memorable though the film is in every aspect, it’s most fondly remembered for the clever, clever, clever acting turns from the exuberantly fired-up star Peter Sellers, who is just hysterical three times over in three different parts, improvising most of his lines and making cast and even the serious-minded director helpless with laughter. His roles are:

(1) as the neurotic American President Merkin Muffley, gloomily having to cope with his crazed officials and the jittery, nervy Soviet leader Kissoff when a crazed US general unleashes an atom bomb on the Soviets;

(2) the bomb’s insane, ex-Nazi German nuclear scientist creator Dr Strangelove, suffering from alien hand syndrome; and

(3) as a ridiculous caricatured, stiff-upper-lip British military man, RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, with his idiot moustache, who’s on secondment loan to America.

Sterling Hayden has one of his best roles as Brigadier General Jack D Ripper, who is paranoid enough to think the fluoridation of the US water supply’s a Soviet plot to poison Americans, deploys a nuclear device on the Russians, without permission from the top. He’s the only one who knows the code to recall the B52 bombers he’s dispatched to Russia and he’s closed down all communications with his Air Force Base. But Mandrake, being held at the base, thinks he might know the code. Can he get a message out?

There are memorable appearances too from George C Scott (General Buck Turgidson), Keenan Wynn (Colonel ‘Bat’ Guano) and Peter Bull (the Russian ambassador Alexi DeSadesky). Slim Pickens (Major ‘King’ Kong) provides the film’s last, darkest joke, waving his cowboy hat rodeo-style as he rides a nuclear bomb onto its target.

Apart from Kubrick and Sellers, the movie’s other hero is production designer Ken Adam, mastermind behind the amazing set of the Pentagon war room, where the US politicians and military frantically try to stop the process leading to the nuclear holocaust. Kubrick hired him because of his work on Dr No.

And I’d add to that list of heroes Gilbert Taylor, whose startlingly brilliant black and white cinematography brings a unique, unsettling, nightmarish look the movie that is astonishingly ‘modern’. The legendary visual genius Taylor (Brighton Rock, Ice Cold in Alex, Repulsion, A Hard Day’s Night, Frenzy, The Omen, Star Wars) passed away in August 2013, aged 99. He said about Strangelove: ‘Lighting that set was sheer magic. I don’t quite know how I got away with it all.’

Kubrick chillingly captures the demented brinkmanship atmosphere of early 60s international politics, summoning up its pain and paranoia, while finding hilarity in one of the most dangerous and unlikely of all places: the countdown to the end of the world. He isn’t afraid to push it to its final, logical conclusion: Pickens aboard the bomb that’s going to blow us all to smithereens (to the WW2 wartime strains of Vera Lynn’s morale-boosting tune ‘We’ll Meet Again’). Talk about dark and scary.

A young James Earl Jones plays Lieutenant Lothar Zogg in his film debut.

Tracy Reed is the only actress in the film, as Turgidson’s secretary, Miss Scott. Reed, who died in May 2012, was the stepdaughter of director Carol Reed and cousin of Oliver Reed. Her early 60s acting promise was sadly unfulfilled.

Filmed at Shepperton Studios, UK, in 1963, but its release was pushed on to 1964 after President Kennedy’s assassination in November.

It was a hit, but a fine serious thriller on this same topic, Fail Safe, made simultaneously, failed at the box office. Kubrick’s judgement to go for a satire turned out to be right.

The full title is Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

PS: Before Louis Burton Lindley Jr became an actor, he was riding on the rodeo circuit. Someone told him that he should take up another line of work because all he would ever get in the rodeo was ‘Slim Pickin’s’. When he showed up on the set of Dr Strangelove dressed as a cowboy and speaking in a thick Southern accent, the British crew thought he was Method acting, not knowing that it was how he always dressed and acted. His brother was the actor Easy Pickens (aka Samuel T. Lindley).

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 209

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/

James Earl Jones plays Lieutenant Lothar Zogg in his film debut.