Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Dr. Strangelove or: The Assassination of Jesse James When the Pawn Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
You might know this comedy ends with the destruction of the world, but do you know how we get there? Well, it starts with the mad General Ripper (Sterling Hayden) and his concern about a “Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” Ripper has Group Captain Mandrake (Peter Sellers) send an order that cannot be countermanded to all airborne B-52s: drop their payloads of thermonuclear bombs on the USSR.
In the War Room, president Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers again) calls in General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott). Turgidson realizes the planes can’t be recalled and advocates launching a preemptive strike against the USSR. The Soviet ambassador (Peter Bull), who has been invited to help solve the crisis, doesn’t love this idea.
But the Ruskies have a doomsday machine: a set of hydrogen bombs that will be automatically detonated by computer if the Americans make a first strike. Worse, it cannot be disarmed. That means that when a B-52 makes it to its target and drops a bomb, that’s the end of the world.
While waiting for the fallout, former Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove1 (Peter Sellers a third time) pitches restarting society deep in abandoned mines. He lays out a plan for who would be welcome in the mines: “it could easily be accomplished with a computer […] programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills.” Ah, computers, the cause of—and solution to!—all of life’s problems.
Rating: 6/10. Fun fact: Dr. Strangelove was based on the 1958 novel “Red Alert” by Peter George. That novel is not a comedy.
Cast and Crew
Peter Sellers: called “the greatest comic genius [England] has produced since Charles Chaplin.” He was born into a family on the variety show circuit, and from the jump he had a talent for creating characters. His breakthrough was with “The Goon Show,” a radio program that ran from 1951 to 1960 and was described as “probably the most influential comedy show of all time.”
Sellers sought a film career beyond the goons, though, so he fashioned himself off of movie star Alec Guinness. Though we saw Guinness in three films, we didn’t see the one that influenced Sellers the most—that’d be Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), where Guinness played eight different characters. That’s what Sellers emulated in The Mouse that Roared (1959, also about nuclear weapons), Lolita (1962), and Dr. Strangelove.
Other notable Sellers moments pre-Strangelove:
Four films with Terry-Thomas, the Brit with the big gap in his teeth.
Comedy songs and albums. One was the bizarre novelty “Goodness Gracious Me” where he, uh, does the Indian voice.2
The role of Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther (1963).
We’ll see Peter Sellers in this column again, albeit in a very different kind of role.
George C. Scott steals this entire movie as General Buck Turgidson. We’ve seen Scott twice in this column playing no-nonsense types, but here…well, just check out this excellent tweet:
The Trivia
Y’know, I wanted to write about the Cold War-era Airborne Alert Force, which made sure there were B-52s armed with nukes in the air 24 hours a day. Did you know these planes sometimes crashed? What a cool topic. But nope, instead we have to talk about every film bro’s favorite director, Stanley Kubrick.3
Film bros will talk about the distinctive look and feel of Kubrick films. You could hang his stills in a museum: they’re meticulously composed and often symmetrical, shot with wide-angle lenses. His was uncompromising, making actors do take after take after take until he got what he wanted. He was crazy about lighting. He was known for long uninterrupted takes and dolly shots4, all in service to an immersive, often unsettling aesthetic.
We’ve talked about guys like Stanley Kramer making “message films,” but some of Kubrick’s early films certainly had clear points of view:
Paths of Glory (1957) was anti-war: Kirk Douglas’ character defends his soldiers who are court-martialed for cowardice (despite not being cowards) during WWI.
Spartacus (1960) was subtly about the Red Scare. Kirk Douglas played the title Roman slave who leads a rebellion against Rome.
Dr. Strangelove. Seemed pretty darn anti-nuclear war.
He also made an adaptation of Lolita (1962), which starred James Mason as Humbert Humbert, Sue Lyon as child Dolores “Lolita” Haze, Shelley Winters as her mother, and Peter Sellers as Quilty (a man Lolita has an affair with). The cool thing to do is to call Lolita your favorite Kubrick film, even if it’s not…
…and that’s because saying it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is passé. 2001’s screenplay was co-written by sci-fi legend Arthur C. Clarke and was based on one of his short stories. It’s about the crew of a spaceship and their supercomputer HAL 9000 traveling to Jupiter to investigate an alien monolith. It’s heavily referenced on “The Simpsons,” and even just the sting of (Richard) Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra” or (Johann) Strauss’ “The Blue Danube” can get film nerds reeling.5
So how do you follow up 2001? How about A Clockwork Orange (1971), an adaptation of an Anthony Burgess novel. The protagonist, Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), is a regular of the Korova Milkbar, a lover of Beethoven, and a speaker of Nadsat6. He does the ultraviolence with his droogs, gets captured, and is re-educated using the “Ludovico Technique.”
Then, after Barry Lyndon7 (1975), Kubrick made The Shining (1980). That one’s divisive: fans of the Stephen King novel (and Stephen King himself) hated Kubrick’s changes and Shelley Duvall was nominated for a Razzie. The film aged well, though, with Jack Nicholson’s nutso performance well-remembered.
And then Full Metal Jacket8 (1987). It starts with 45 minutes of Marine recruits being drilled by the sadistic Gny. Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), who is eventually murdered by the ineffectual recruit nicknamed “Gomer Pyle” (Vincent D’Onofrio). Then main character “Joker” (Matthew Modine) goes to Vietnam where a bunch of Vietnam stuff happens.
Kubrick’s last film was Eyes Wide Shut (1999), which I’ve seen (and also listened to four whole hours of podcasts on) and yet still don’t even really know the plot. It’s about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and orgies? I dunno, man.9
Odds and Ends
The recently deceased James Earl Jones had his film debut as the B-52’s bombardier…Sellers was originally supposed to play the role of Major Kong as well…Keenan Wynn, son of Ed Wynn, played Col. “Bat” Guano…the 1964 Sidney Lumet film Fail Safe is the same film as Dr. Strangelove…the song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again” refrains through the B-52 scenes, while the song “We’ll Meet Again” plays over the outro of thermonuclear explosions…“You're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company”…Ripper mentions water fluoridation as a communist plot (it’s not)…the film originally ended with a big pie fight in the War Room…Sellers’ president was based on Adlai Stevenson…the film ends with Strangelove yelping “Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!”
Dr. Strangelove was patterned on Wernher von Braun. Another scientist, Edward Teller (called “the father of the H-bomb”) later received the nickname “Dr. Strangelove.”
The song was made for the movie The Millionairess with Sophia Loren, where Sellers played an Indian doctor in brownface. Here’s a discussion of why that matters.
Well, that’s not true. Some film bros prefer Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, PTA, or the Coen Brothers. Y’all know how film bros are.
That’s when you mount a camera on a dolly, allowing it to move smoothly.
A sequel to 2001, entitled 2010 (1984), was made, though not by Kubrick.
A language Burgess made up, based on Russian and English.
Barry Lyndon is based on a William Makepeace Thackeray novel and it’s another Kubrick film hipsters say they like even though they don’t. The film is basically Tom Jones if Tom Jones wasn’t funny.
Based on Gustav Hasford’s novel “The Short Timers.”
Look, could I read Viennese Modernist Arthur Schnitzler’s “Traumnovelle” (“Dream Story” in English), on which Eyes Wide Shut was based, to figure it out? Yeah, I could, but I’m not gonna do that. I’m probably not even gonna remember Arthur Schnitzler’s name.