Kubrick's Best

Rating: 10/10 (12 April 2000)

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)
This is the kind of film you can say is 'the best ever' and not look like an idiot, a comedy worthy of Voltaire or Cervantes, and a thriller to rival the best Hollywood ever produced. I'm willing to bet this movie will be remembered long after most of the movies of the Twentieth Century have faded to oblivion.
Kubrick's satirical masterpiece was made not long after, and keyed by, the publication of such serious, but absurd academic tomes as Herman Kahn's 'On Thermonuclear War' in which the author assured us that nuclear war was not only survivable, but even winnable, and at any rate we could recuperate. Consequently he became one of the focal points of Kubrick's satire, embodied as Dr. Strangelove, the scientist with the arm-jerk Nazi salute and Nazi mentality, played chillingly by Peter Sellers, who also played U.S. president Merkin Muffley and British Air Force Captain Lionel Mandrake. Kubrick and Terry Southern, who wrote the rapier-sharp screen play, proved profoundly prescient when it was discovered some years later that nuclear war really was not winnable because it would usher in a 'nuclear winter' that would becloud the entire planet for months or years to come, bringing starvation and death to billions. By making Dr Strangelove a Nazi, Kubrick was looking back, imagining, as we all were in those days, what horrors would have befallen the world had the Nazis gotten the bomb instead of the U.S. Start World War II five years later and we'd probably have Hiroshima in Chicago. Making Dr. Strangelove a Nazi also allowed Kubrick to allude to how the Nazi scientists were incorporated into the Soviet Union's bomb-building arsenal after WW II.
Part of the effectiveness of the movie is how it is dramatically presented. As the Strategic Air Command planes are flying toward the Soviet Union to drop their bombs, the tension is wonderfully emphasized and prolonged by the long, almost languid conversation between a very relaxed Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) philosophizing over his cigar on the importance of his precious vital fluids, and a frantic Capt Mandrake politely suggesting that what is going on is madness. This is followed by the out-of-change-for-the-phone soda machine scene with Corporal 'Bat' Guano (Keenan Wynn) who is more worried about the possibility of petty theft than the possibility of nuclear war.
Although this film would never have existed without the comedic genius of Terry Southern, major credit for its success must go to the actors, not only to Peter Sellars, who was magnificent, but to Sterling Hayden and George C. Scott who seemed to feed off of one another in a 'let's see you top this' flamboyant comedic style. Scott was later to win an academy award for his portrayal of Gen. Patton (Patton 1970)), but his work there owed a lot to what he did here as General 'Buck' Turgidson. By the way, all these 'meaningful' names and most of the hilarious dialogue are the work of Terry Southern, who also penned such sixties classics as Easy Rider (1969), Candy (1968), and The Loved One (1965), the latter from Evelyn Waugh's satirical novel about the funeral industry. Some memorable highlights:
Slim Pickets proving his intimate love for the bomb by riding down on it, like a cowboy breaking a bronco.
Russian Ambassador Sadesky (the name is, yes, an allusion to the Marque de Sade) explains why the Russians built the 'doomsday machine,' which would blow up the whole world: 'We couldn't keep up with (the expense) of the arms race, the space race, the peace race...' (Another prophetic observation, by the way.) We feared a 'doomsday gap' (a take-off on the then current buzz phrase, 'missile gap').
The scene at the hotel with Turgidson's girl friend/secretary in her bikini answering the phone and covering for him as though she is a producer's secretary warding off somebody he doesn't want to talk to. The audience knows the call's about impeding nuclear war, but she must pretend Turgidson is properly indisposed.
Peter Sellars as President Merkin Muffley talking to the Russian premier (Khrushchev) as an enormously patient, kindly father with a drunken son. Incidentally, Muffley's appearance was patterned after Adlai Stevenson, the democratic candidate for president who twice lost to Eisenhower in the fifties. Also note that a merkin is a toupee for the mound of Venus.
Gen. Ripper telling Mandrake how women sensed his power and wanted his vital fluids; and how a significant part of the commie conspiracy was to fluoridate our water and poison us (actually a real concern at the time by some fringe groups).
Second only to Pickens's bronco ride as a symbol of the movie is Dr. Strangelove's spastic salute to Hitler...
Finally I have to say that one of the reasons this movie is still vital even though the Soviet Union has disbanded, is that the concern was real. During the Cuban missile crisis in the early sixties, Kennedy and Khrushchev came perilously close to nuclear warfare. Kubrick, Terry Southern and cast are to be commended for showing us the incredible folly of the age of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).