Distant Early Warning

Rating: 8/10 (24 March 2006)

This is black comedy taken to its most ridiculous extreme -- by satirizing a topical 'worry' that wasn't funny at the time. It's not that nuclear war or communism could ever really be funny; by skewering McCarthyists and John Birchers, we can see here how the joke was very much on us -- on our cultural reaction to those phenomena. Today, we can laugh at this in comfort, because of the distance.
Consider how many ways this has influenced our culture, from "A Boy and his Dog" to "Wargames"...and not just movies, but popular music as well; "Grace Under Pressure" immediately comes to mind. It is this self-rejuvenating quality of the priceless fragments that makes Strangelove so important.
The key was the implementation of Sellers as the narrator(s). He would famously say in interviews that he thought of himself as having no inherent identity, only the identity of the character he played at any given time.
Here he's in his element...imagine what an even greater coup he could have pulled off if he hadn't broken his leg during filming. He still gives us 'Mandrake' played as Clouseau, 'President Muffly' played as Adlai Stevenson, and the evil 'Doctor' played as a Fritz Lang/Albert Speer concoction; all three fight for control 'in' the movie and 'of' the movie. In the end, only the Doctor gets what he wants, prompting his symbolic erectile response...this is juxtaposed with the phallic bomb causing the fireball 'orgasm'.
This is an early fruition of the Kubrickian 'camera participation' approach to film-making. Irreducibly hilarious pieces here, maybe not so much the entirety.