Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Stanley Kubrick (1964)
The design of ‘the war room’ (by Ken Adam), the elegant black-and-white photography (by Gilbert Taylor), the deadly stately movement of the aircraft – all combine to give Dr Strangelove a look and a stylish dispassion that seal its reputation. Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire is an ice-cool film and fascinating as a product of its time. It was made in the months following the Cuban missile crisis. Its release was delayed by a few weeks in the light of the assassination of President Kennedy. The screenplay – by Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George – is adapted from George’s 1958 novel Red Alert. This was originally published in Britain as Two Hours to Doom and the ninety-five-minute movie’s action takes place in something approaching real time. There are three locations: the Burpelson Air Force Base, whose paranoid commander, General Jack D Ripper, launches a unilateral preemptive air strike on the Soviet Union; the cockpit of a B-52 bomber, captained by Major T J ‘King’ Kong, en route to deliver its nuclear payload; and the Pentagon war room, where the US President, Merkin Muffley, with his Joint Chiefs of Staff and advisers, makes desperate attempts to avert apocalypse.
The main characters’ names are quite something. They’re always funny and often more imaginatively suggestive than Ripper, Kong and the milquetoast liberal Muffley. These three take their place in the list of dramatis personae beside Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, General ‘Buck’ Turgidson, Colonel ‘Bat’ Guano, the Soviet Ambassador de Sadesky and the eponymous doctor (né Merkwürdigliebe). Peter Sellers’s finest work in cinema was done for Stanley Kubrick – as the identity-shifting Clare Quilty in Lolita and in his three roles here, as Mandrake, Muffley and Strangelove. There’s a strong cartoon element to each of them but it’s striking that Sellers, on this exceptionally demanding assignment, achieves a depth of characterisation that often eluded him in a single role. He’ll always be remembered in Strangelove principally for his playing of the Wernher von Braun-inspired, wheelchair-bound title character, who addresses the President as ‘Mein Führer’ and whose right arm more than compensates for his inactive (until the last scene) lower limbs: it keeps threatening a black-gloved Nazi salute which the left arm struggles to subdue. But Sellers’s portraits of the affable silly-ass, desperately frightened Mandrake and the pompously peevish Muffley are marvellous too. (In terms of screen time, Strangelove is much the smallest of the three parts.) As Turgidson, George C Scott makes a splendid entrance. In the suite he shares with his mistress (Tracy Reed, the only woman in the cast), he marches in to take a phone call and, shirt open, whacks his stomach to show how rock-hard it is. Back in uniform in the war room, Scott does a lot of high-grade mugging but his force often transcends the caricature he’s playing. His profile also makes George C Scott ideally cast in the role of a hawk. Sterling Hayden is very disturbing as Ripper. Slim Pickens gives the Texan Kong a startling doggone verve. Keenan Wynn delivers a superb cameo as the fearsomely humourless Bat Guano.
The film’s lampooning of American gung-ho competitiveness is sometimes too deliberate but Dr Strangelove is a classic of political comedy. It’s less surprising that reviews of the film on its original release took Kubrick to task for a ‘snide’ and ‘sick’ approach than that David Denby, in his New Yorker piece on its fiftieth anniversary, should sum it up in 2014 as ‘as outrageously prankish, juvenile, and derisive as ever’. The first two of those three adjectives, at least, aren’t qualities that you normally associate with Stanley Kubrick and they’re far from salient in Strangelove. I’d seen the film only once before, in the mid-1970s – not long after seeing A Clockwork Orange for the first time. I think I found, even then, a similar quality in these two chilling, compelling pictures. The ‘prankish’ and ‘juvenile’ elements of Strangelove are cloaked in Kubrick’s trademark magisterial froideur. That’s a quality which can pall but which, in this case, is a highly effective means of reminding the audience that the themes of his comedy are not a laughing matter. Kubrick’s clinical approach, if it doesn’t wipe the smile off your face, functions as a properly persistent shadow to the movie’s humour. The traction of these two things is what makes Dr Strangelove so distinctive and memorable.
6 May 2016