For a Chess Player, He was One Hell of a Filmmaker

Rating: 9/10 (26 December 2010)

Kubrick's cynical vision of the progress of technology and human stupidity assumes the delighted impression of a film that got away with something. LBJ was in the White House, the Republicans were priming Goldwater, both sides considered the Cold War with bleak gravity, and the world was learning to get used to the term "nuclear deterrent," which meant that if you kill me, I'll kill you, and then we'll all die. "Better dead than Red," several believed. Others believed the reverse. The options were not attractive. The Bomb eclipsed foreign policy.
Then the great BAFTA-winning expatriate's masterpiece of satire, paranoia and straight comedy released with the power of a splash of ice water. What Kubrick's Cold War send-up illustrated was not men reliant on machines, but vice versa, particularly the mad Gen. Jack D. Ripper.
Proceedings on Ripper's army base are interconnected with scenes aboard one of the B-52s, and with an urgent assembly in the Pentagon's War Room, still one of the most unforgettable sets ever built for a movie, with its immense world maps impending over a vast committee with an undaunted sphere of light above it.
The screenplay, by Terry Southern with Kubrick and Peter George, twists this premise into a black farce, clarified by bursts of sharp satire. Some of the dialogue has penetrated our lexicon. The scene at the telephone booth between Guano and the British ambassador, who doesn't have the correct change to call the White House and save humankind, is one of the movie's most exceptionally brilliant gags.
If Sterling Hayden creates a scowling, unreasonable Gen. Ripper, George C. Scott is inspired as his foil, Gen. Buck Turgidson, who chomps gum, gnarls his mouth, and discloses one statement of dire straits after another to the President. And Sellers, as president, has a succession of awkward hotline exchanges with the Soviet Premier that slashes nuclear annihilation to the degree of an excruciating social faux pas.
The defining passage on a subject so crushingly unpleasant that all one can do is laugh, Dr. Strangelove has the highest form of verbal humor: The self-destruct device self-destructed, we learn, and you can't fight in the War Room. And counter to the theoretical deliberations in the Pentagon, there's the uncomplicated nationalism of the B-52 pilot, Maj. King Kong, who assures his crew there's going to be upgrades and streamers everywhere. His departure from the story stays one of the most recognized moments in contemporary cinema.
The one part of the film, still one of the finest political satires, that doesn't quite succeed is the War Room sequence that comes between Pickens' rowdy ride and the ultimate nuclear montage. Sellers, as Strangelove, quarrels riotously with his disobedient bionic hand, yet the dialogue doesn't seem to go anywhere, and the scene feels peculiarly unproductive. In an earlier shot in the War Room, we've seen an elongated table covered with cakes and pies, and it's understood Kubrick meant to end the scene with a pie fight. Dr. Strangelove would've been perfect if he kept in the climactic pie fight. That's true brilliance. Without it, the film truly does feel as if it's missing a final scene.
Regardless, seen after over half a century, like a morbidly sick Looney Tunes short it feels extraordinarily crisp and unsullied, a lucid, impudent, treacherous lampoon. And its eagerness to pursue its scenario to its commonsense close has an integrity that today's spineless gift-wrapping mechanics would almost certainly sidestep. Its black and white photography aids, moreover, putting an unembellished visage on its lethal political absurdities. If movies of this derision, cleverness and rancor were still being made, the world just might be better at staying on its toes.