above: Keenan Wynn plays US Major Batguano, a man who strongly suspects his British brother officer, RAF Group Captain Mandrake (Peter Sellers), of being a dangerous "prevert". Her Majesty's Man on the Spot, Mandrake has the unenviable task of trying to convince his respected American ally that he is not a "prevert", and there is a bit more at stake--nuclear war, in fact--than what meets the major's presumptions (or is it "persumptions" I wonder?)
Despite his suspected "preversions", Mandrake has been actually dealing with a lunatic, General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), who, in the cause of preserving the precious bodily fluids of free men and women, has unleashed a nuclear first strike by the USA against You-Know-Who.
Because of a Stanley Kubrick movie he had seen, Ronald Reagan thought that there was a "War Room" somewhere in the White House. He asked to see it on a visit to the American Empire's first residence, as President-Elect in 1980, according to the documentary "The Making of 'Dr. Strangelove" (2000) a hour-long feature that you can see on the DVD version of the film.
Somebody had to break the news to the next president that there was no war room. I admit I would have asked the same question. I would have bet there was even a "big board", tracking the movement of American war ships and B-52's encircling the Soviet Union and Moscow's installations and weapons covering North America.
It makes sense. If the world would come to an end, there had to be a scoreboard at the White House or somewhere in Washington, DC, to keep track, right?
Alas, it was all a made-up job, fostered by the nuclear-fevered imagination of Kubrick or screen writer Terry Southern and designed for the 1963 comedy classic by the drawing board of the great set designer Ken Adam.
It's interesting that, of all the nuclear doomsday movies that have been released during the long Cold War--from Stanley Kramer's "On the Beach" (1959) to Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe (1964) to "The Bedford Incident" (1965) and Robert Aldrich's Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977) , et al, only "Strangelove" transcends its time. I suspect part of its lasting power comes from the fact that Stanley Kubrick was such an anal genius when it came to getting his vision on film. He read dozens of dry technical books to get the right feel for the ways of thermonuclear war. And Terry Southern is a truly funny writer and a relentless critic. He and Sellers also worked together on "The Magic Christian" (1969) , a less successful but no less subversive take on the establishment. Sellers himself did a lot of improvising under Kubrick's perfectionist gaze and no one-way phone conversation in cinema history is as funny and brilliant as his "Hello Dimitri" exchange with the Soviet Premier on the hot line.
No film for my money had a overall cast quite as talented as the one assembled for this Swiftian satire. In my most recent viewing of the film, I of course enjoyed Sellers' three role tour de force and the near-manic performance of the other master of screen acting, George C. Scott, as the inimitable Buck Turgison. But the next time you see it note how perfect the smaller roles have been filled: Slim Pickens as the rustic Major T.J. Kong; the lone woman, sexy Tracy Reed--niece of director Sir Carol Reed-- as General Turgison's efficient and "all-purpose" secretary, and Peter Bull as the Russian Ambassador, the man who delivers the terrible news about "The Doomsday Machine"in an appropriately melodramatic way in the War Room, all without bothering to put on a Russian accent and being none the less authentic for it!
But I think the thing that puts the film over into greatness and makes it stand alone as a testament to human folly and obsession above the Cold War background is the fact that the whole movie is played for laughs against a very realistic background. Had the film been dramatic (as Kubrick originally intended) something important would have been lost: the sense of humanity falling down the highly-radiated nuclear rabbit hole because our faith in technology and invention of greater modes of "security" have utterly hoisted said humanity on its own petard. There is a great joke in human progress in science and military arts leading our rational thoughts perhaps back to the conclusion that homo sapiens might have been better off as a species just to stay in our caves and bang at each other with clubs, as per humanity's old tribal ways. The director even originally intended to end the film with no less a immature note than a huge pie fight among the military brass in the War Room.
I think this is sense of supreme irony was part of what Kubrick and Company were getting at, and the only way to really appreciate irony is either to make it tragic like Oedipus Rex or King Lear, or, go it one better and make the audience laugh and then leave the theater more unsettled than before about our leaders and our hopes for the future. This irony of progress leading us back to a helpless and almost primitive state was a theme Kubrick would explore again a few years later in "2001: A Space Odyssey". Maybe it wasn't such a good idea for Prometheus to steal fire from Zeus after all. Well, not in the long run anyway.
For more info and inside stuff on the movie, here's a a site which links to other sites on the movie:
Kubrick Multimedia Film Guide: Dr. Strangelove
And, the celebrated Pablo Ferro trailer for the film, courtesy of You Tube:
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