Peter Sellers' finest hour

Rating: 8/10 (15 November 2013)

Three years before he turned the nation's stomachs with the ultra- violence of A Clockwork Orange, and sixteen years before he scared them senseless with The Shining, cinema's finest auteur Stanley Kubrick captured perfectly the absurdity of the Cold War nuclear deterrent.
When an army commander goes haywire and, without due authority, sets in motion an airborne nuclear attack on Russian bases, the US president (one of Sellers' three roles) and his trusted team of military 'experts' must save the day.
Prominent among these 'experts' is General Buck Turgidson (Scott), a gloriously American hothead who can wave off the idea of ten to twenty million civilian casualties with a flick of his wrist in a way that would make George W. Bush blush. He, along with the mysterious Dr Strangelove (also Sellers) and a circle of bumbling high brass, are the world's hope for avoiding nuclear war. It's a scary thought that must have been downright terrifying in the paranoia of the Cold War.
Despite being at heart a film with about as serious a message as it's possible to have, pitch black comedy still manages to permeate every scene. It's a guilty laugh, a laugh that becomes a grimace of fear when you realise that reality is not quite as far away from events unfolding on screen as we'd probably like it to be.
Dr Strangelove also marks Peter Sellers' finest hour, giving him and his incredible versatility free reign. He was initially expected to play four roles (cowboy pilot Major Kong to be the fourth), but perhaps understandably the workload proved too great.