Cinematic Perfection

Rating: 10/10 (15 February 2014)

For around 10 years this was my favourite film of all time, and has only settled into the number 2 spot after I saw Modern Times. Dr. Strangelove is magnificent on all fronts, the acting, writing, direction, sets, music, it's all flawless.
To begin, let's consider Sellers' three roles. Colonel Mandrake is superb, Sellers downplays the character perfectly in the style of the traditional British military officer. The marvellous thing is watching what he doesn't say: he is faced with insanity, but he cannot lose his decorum, so he often stumbles over the beginning of a sentence, as though he'd considered something more assertive but thought it impolite. The scenes between him and Colonel Ripper are my favourites, both are so under-acted, there is so much silence and darkness, it's as though time slows down; in this room are two individuals, one completely underwhelming and one truly insane, who will decide the fate of the world. For me the greatest point in the film is Hayden's delivery of the line 'I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, indoctrination, subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.' The pauses accumulate as the line goes on, until at the end when each word dangles one at a time before you, each second you realise how insane Ripper is, and of course it's met with Mandrake's response that so perfectly displays a look of equal parts confusion, condescension and terror. What's so great about Hayden's performance as Ripper, unlike so many performances of psychopaths, what makes him scary is that there is no self-recognition of the craziness, he truly believes every word (note the superb camera and lighting in this scene, the Dutch angle below Ripper's desk, the half-shadow on his face, the camera doesn't waver a millimetre during the speech, and the only distraction is the punctuation of the cigar smoke). But I think the real stellar moment of these scenes, in terms of acting, comes towards the end, when Ripper realises all is lost and he asks Mandrake if he's ever been tortured. Sellers delivers this scene perfectly. There is a mixture of true modesty, shame, fear, regret, but most of all a sense of something being too painful to remember, Mandrake isn't trying to be brave, he just pushes on, an embodiment of the 'stiff upper lip'.
The other great partnership in the film is Sellers as President Muffley and Scott as General Turgidson (though perhaps I should make note of the other great back-and-forth, Sellers vs Sellers on the phone to the Kremlin, probably the greatest piece of improvisation in film history). George C. Scott is truly outstanding in these scenes; he's a schoolboy who's been put in charge of the most powerful military in the world. But the character is more complex than this: he's intelligent, in that he's informed and forward-thinking, he walks the President into the strategies he has planned, revealing pieces of information bit by bit. In many ways it's the absurdity of the situation they all find themselves in that creates the absurdity in the man. Sellers plays the straight-man in these scenes and works so well with Scott (although, Sellers actually gets some of the great laugh out loud moments, the famous 'you can't fight in here, this is the war room', and the phone call to the Kremlin, such a genuine representation of speaking to a drunk person, 'I'm fine, you're fine yes as you say we're both fine'). Again, a note for the camera work, each shot is held for a long time while each man speaks, they tend not to track but to simply frame and allow the characters to move around in a set space. There is the surrounding darkness, with the slow movement of the dots on the big board, providing a constant reminder of the ticking bomb.
And then of course there's the titular character, the Nazi scientist (most probably an import from Operation Paperclip) who seizes the chance to allow his eugenic master plan to come to fruition. Yes, the battle with the arm is one of the great slapstick scenes in cinema (note the Russian ambassador can barely hold in his laughs), but listen to Sellers' delivery as well, the way he emphasises words has a great subtlety to it. There's something I find mystifying about this scene, there's a real sense of waiting for the end to hit. Throughout there has been a back and forth between Ripper's base, the War Room and the B-52 which has kept pace in the film, and when the Strangelove scene comes afterwards, it's exceptionally quiet, there's very little interruption, only a few lines from Sellers as President and Scott. It speaks to the insanity of the Cold War, that the world is ending and all these powerful men can do is sit and make silly plans that will never happen.
and I've not even mentioned the B-52 scenes, Major Kong as the cowboy who's no longer in command of a horse and revolver, but a B-52 and a hydrogen bomb. Kubrick is one of my favourite directors, and I think this is his finest moment. I mentioned in my review of Modern Times how powerful it can be to say something through comedy rather than drama, how it forces us to take its absurdities for granted rather than to focus on them, and I would say that it's one thing if you can tell someone that the world is insane and we're plummeting towards our own doom, and it's altogether more incredible if you can make them laugh about it. Dr. Strangelove sits alongside films such as Citizen Kane, The Godfather and Sunset Boulevard as one of those films where everything just comes together perfectly, all aspects complement the overall goal. Kubrick's vision is genius but it's also down to the brilliance of the cast and crew that make this film so good.