All For Our Natural Bodily Fluids

Rating: 10/10 (6 April 2008)

It can safely be assumed that DR. STRANGELOVE could not have been made in the Eisenhower years. Even after Senator McCarthy's fall from public support, Ike and the Republicans (and the Democrats) were too involved in the politics of the Cold War to consider the ultimate point of containment and confrontation of the Soviet Union and the Communists as a subject worth laughing at. I can only think of one film, THE ATOMIC KID, that appeared in the 1950s, and somewhat spoofed nuclear disaster. In that film Mickey Rooney stumbles into a cabin stocked with supplies when he and his friend/partner Robert Strauss are looking for assistance (their car broke down). Rooney is at the site when a nuclear bomb is dropped on it (it is the target). He survives, and the only rationale for it is that he was eating peanut butter sandwiches. The antics of American and Russian agents get involved in that film, as does the American habit of looking for the main chance (Strauss sees Rooney as a potential gold mine in the advertising world). But it is pretty lightweight stuff - and miles away from the real sense of dread surrounding STRANGELOVE.
Make no mistake about this darkest of comedies. For all the humor involved, it shows the human race is so paranoid and so stupid that we will stumble very easily into our own obliteration at each other's hands. It's hard to argue with that view. And note that two years before Stanley Kubrick's film was released, the world came very close to a politically caused nuclear Armageddon in the Cuban Missile Crisis. This film remains potentially true.
General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden's role; I love that name) orders a secret nuclear attack on Russia because he has become convinced that the Russians are using fluoridation to undermine our virility. He has shut down the Burpleton Airforce Base (it has a great sign - "Peace is our Business" - on the field), so that nobody can reach him to order the planes back. Only his British military aide, Major Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers in his first of three roles) is available (despite Ripper's overwhelming presence) to try to undue the damage.
In the meantime other U.S. military forces tip off the Pentagon Brass and President Merton Muffly (Sellers in his second role) about the launching of the attack. The leading adviser on the Air Force, General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) comes into the meeting from enjoying his bodily fluids (he tells the girl to say her prayers). Scott is taken to task by Muffly about the failure of a comprehensive psychiatric test for upper level officers that failed to reveal General Ripper was insane. Turgidson suggests that one failure does not disprove the system doesn't work. Muffley is also turned off by Turgidson's suggestions that rather than stop Ripper's attack, we should go fully ballistic on the U.S.S.R. "I can promise," Turgidson rattles off, "thirty million U.S. casualties tops!" Muffley tries to prepare the Russians - he invites their ambassador De Sadeski (Peter Bull) to the Pentagon War Room, and he tries to warn the drunken Russian Premier, Dimitri Kissoff, but has to reduce his serious warning to almost a fairy tale ("Well...one of our generals went a little funny in the head.").
The contemporary serious film FAILSAFE had similar problems emerge when a computer system erroneously triggers an attack. The President there (Henry Fonda) was not confronted by as many forms of idiocy as Seller's Muffley (including his own). Fonda actually does reach the planes but they refuse to believe he is President. Muffley too gets to the planes (once he gets the correct code used) but one plane has a busted radio and never hears him. That is the plane of Major "King" Kong (Slim Pickens), who has the most famous last fatal ride in cinematic history.
Most of the figures in DR. STRANGELOVE are based on real life figures. Muffley was based on Adlai Stevenson, a well-intentioned man who twice ran for President, but couldn't sell himself (against Eisenhower, who could?). Ripper (forgetting who his name is based on) is based on General Edward Walker who openly espoused anti-fluoridation and John Birch politics in his job. Turgidson is based on General Curtis LeMay, a great Air Force figure from World War II, but too openly anti-Russian in the Cold War. De Sadesky (who shows a sneaky side twice in the film) seems based on Andrei Gromyko, the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. in the Missile Crisis. Kissoff may be based on Nikita Khrustchev.
And then there is Strangelove (Sellers in the best of his three performances). A neo - Nazi scientist transported to the U.S. (a beneficiary of "Operation Paper Clip" at the end of World War II, where scientists like Werner Von Braun ended up in the U.S. for our military's purposes), he has elements of Von Braun and Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born scientist (so-called father of the Hydrogen bomb) who hated the Communists or anyone who might start defending them (he did a number on J. Robert Oppenheimer). Anyone else? There has been a persistent suggestion that Strangelove is based on Henry Kissinger, but this seems not to be true. Certainly the crippled madman, with his mechanical arm that won't behave itself (it keeps "heiling") is one of a kind, suggesting a sexual paradise in the future within the abandoned gold mines and cold mines of America. At the end he rises from his wheelchair without thinking, and suddenly announces, "Mein Fuhrer...I can walk!" In the thermonuclear age as Armageddon advances our leader shows he has barely stopped being a crawling baby!!
For the sake of that performance alone the film is worth seeing. Definitely worth seeing for the performances of the whole cast and Kubrick's directorial excellence.