Overheated,over- -rated,over -long,over - acted.Underwhelming.

Rating: 4/10 (5 January 2008)

There is more ham on display in "Dr Strangelove" than on the ham counter in Sainsbury's on a day when ham is on special offer.Look at the names involved...George C.Scott,Sterling Hayden,Slim Pickens,Keenan Wynn,Peter Sellers,Peter Bull.....................none of them actually renowned for understatement and all under the control - for want of a better word - of a director who was to prove throughout his career that he was often unwilling or unable to restrain his actors on the one hand or motivate them on the other.In a number of his best known works the human beings are merely ciphers,secondary to the machinery,be that machinery a rifle,a coca - cola machine,a computer or a B 52 bomber. In 1964 we lived under a constant largely imaginary threat of nuclear holocaust.It kept us in line in much the same way as the threat of Al Quaeda does today.And the threat of eternal damnation did two hundred years earlier. Instead of the big bad Reds it is "The axis of evil" and "Rogue States" that are our enemy now.The result for us is just the same,we meekly hand over our taxes to whoever at the moment is slopping around in the trough and they keep the shareholders at British Aerospace Arms Division and Boeing in the style to which they have become accustomed. "Dr Strangelove",like many a Kubrick movie,is merely an overstatement of the bloody obvious.It is clothed with the trappings of the satire boom which was reaching its peak at the time,Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce in the U.S.,"Private Eye" and "Beyond the Fringe" here in the U.K. In the persona of Dr. Strangelove himself,Mr P.Sellers gives one of the worst performances ever seen in a so - called" serious " movie.This is closely followed by George C.Scott and Sterling Hayden in a tie for runner - up. Much like Richard Attenborough's "Oh!, what a lovely war" ,Kubrick's movie tells us what we already know and hammers it into us like a sadistic maths teacher with a blackboard rubber.War is a Bad Thing. Nuclear Bombs are a bad thing.Letting them off without proper supervision can be dangerous.Well,thank you Stanley.