So audacious that you can forgive its imperfections

Rating: Null/10 (11 June 2010)

Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1963) is such a bold, arresting and confrontational comedic take on an unfathomably awful subject that you can forgive its imperfections. Sterling Hayden is the crazed brigadier general who blames the Russkies for his impotence, saying it's because they fluoridated his water. So he sends over some bombers to nuke them. If they succeed, the commies' Doomsday Machine will see the whole world go up in smoke. George C. Scott is Hayden's warmongering boss, while Peter Sellers excels in three roles: playing the President, madcap ex-Nazi scientist Dr Strangelove and, best of all, stiff-upper-lipped British captain Lionel Mandrake. The scene in which Mandrake tries to explain what on earth has been going on to endlessly suspicious colonel Bat Guano (Keenan Wynn) is a comic masterpiece. There are slow stretches, and Kubrick's notorious anal impulse means we get a lot of tedious detail about how exactly one would drop a bomb, but there's genius at work here, and it's a movie everyone should see.