Still a blast after all those years

Rating: Null/10 (20 December 1999)

Those of us who grew up during the cold war have reason to thank Stanley Kubrick, who had the brilliant insight that the only way to stay sane in the face of nuclear annihilation was to laugh at the absurdity of it all. He started out with Peter George's serious "what would happen if." novel "Red Alert" and produced with the aid of some very fine actors a black comedy you'd have to be psychotic not to understand.
Seeing it again after many years, I was conscious of how my focus had changed. As a schoolkid who had recently experienced the Cuban missile crisis, I concentrated firmly on the laughs: "You can't fight here, this is the War Room," "Precious bodily fluids", "You're going to have to answer to the Coca Cola company" and the slapstick: "Mein Fuerher, I can valk!" Now I can see how deadly accurate the comedy was, and how well the film was made, with only four or five sets and minimalist back projection for the aerial shots. The War Room itself, huge, bare, efficient and enclosed, is a great metaphor for the military mind. Kubrick, by highlighting the heroism of the bomber crew, sends up wonderfully the laudatory war movie which was very much in evidence at the time ("The Dambusters," "Reach for the Sky" etc). The Strangelove character is a bit of an "add on" but I don't agree that the final War Room scene, in which Strangelove outlines his plan for a post nuclear underground brothel/breeding farm for the Chosen Ones, is redundant. As long as the bastards running the world think they might personally escape a nuclear holocaust the rest of us are at greater risk. There was something to be said for "Mutually Assured Destruction" or MAD.
The acting performances are all definitive and we are lucky Peter Sellers did not do Major Kong, thus depriving us of Slim Picken's heroic cowboy pilot who, against all the odds, reaches a target and rides the bomb right to the ground. George C Scott, only 40 at the time, as General Buck Turgidson is a sort of proto-Patton on speed, alternately petulant, sly, mystical, gung-ho and evasive. Peter Sellers rises to the challenge of making a couple of "normal' characters, the President and Group Captain Mandrake, interesting (Strangelove is pure vaudeville) and Sterling Hayden, helped by camera angles, made it clear that no-one was going to convince General Jack D Ripper he was wrong about fluoridation. (The problem about Col. "Bat" Guano (Keenan Wynn), he with the hatred for "preverts" and the solicitude for the fixtures of the Coca Cola Company is that there are too many people like that in the real world for such a character to be very funny.)
The Kubrick touch is evident in the detail as usual. In Washington the phone in Gneral Turgidson's bedroom is answered by his secretary and mistress, Miss Scott (Tracey Reed). In the pilot's seat on board the B-52 overflying Russia, Major Kong is discovered ogling the centerfold of "Playboy" and this month's Pet is, naturally, Miss Scott.
It's all a bit over the top, but for once that helps. There's a lot of talk and techno-babble and the pace is not particularly fast. The world goes down the gurgler at a stately pace and there's not a damned thing anyone can do about it. All the procedures designed to stop such a disaster happening are gone through, but found to be ineffective. One of them turns out to have provided General Ripper with his opportunity to get the Russians first before they pollute his precious bodily fluids.
It's interesting to compare "Dr Strangelove" with "Failsafe," another movie on the same theme (but from a different book) which played it as straight drama. "Failsafe" with Henry Fonda as the hero president from central casting, was a well made movie, nothing more. "Dr Strangelove" is art in the cause of humanity.