We'll Meet Again Don't Know Were Don't Know when

Rating: 10/10 (18 March 2005)

***SPOILERS**** Even though the movie "Dr. Strangelove" opens to the romantic and tender music of "Try A Little Tenderness", as we see a B52 bomber being refiled in mid-air, and ends to the touching and sweet sound of "We'll Meet Again", as we see the world go up in flames in a series of thermonuclear explosions, there's little or nothing in the film that has to do with either love and romance. Everything in the movie has to do with madness and insanity.
Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper, Sterling Hayden, has been obsessed with the thought that the Soviets have been polluting the nations drinking water, through the evil process of fluoridation. Gen. Ripper feels hat the Soviets first ant to corrupt the natural fluids or essences of the American people and then, when thats accomplished, take over the USA without firing a shot. Ordering the 843rd Air Wing, which Gen. Ripper is in command of, on a bombing mission in the USSR the General feels that he has to stop the Soviets for doing any more damage to those vital and precious fluids, that flow through the bodies of the American people, before it's too late. It takes a while for those in the US Government authority, from the president of the United States on down, to realize that Ripper has gone off the deep end but by the time they came to that realization it was too late to stop him. The 34 B52 bombers that he ordered to take off with 50 megatons of nuclear explosives each, are by then well on their way in igniting WWIII.
Stanley Kubrick's terrifying 1964 black comedy, made two years after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, based on the little known book "Red Alert" by Peter George "Dr. Strangelove" is without a doubt one of the most effective anti-war as well as the most shattering movie about nuclear destruction ever made. When trying to recall the B52 bombers, after they passed their fail-safe points, becomes futile US President Merkin Muffely, Peter Sellers, gets in touch with the Soviet Premiere Damitri Kissoff. Premiere Kissoff who's drunk and partying, in what seems like, a bordello is asked to work together with the USA in shooting down the attacking B52's. This has to be done before they drop their payloads on his country's missile and defense bases.
Too drunk and agitated to do anything at first Premiere Kissoff agrees with Pres. Muffley to cooperate. By the time that the US bombers were to strike deep inside Russia all but one were either shot down or recalled. The recall order was discovered by RAF Group Captain Mandrake, again Peter Sellers, who was the British liaison officer at the Brupelson Air Force base. Mandreke discovered and deciphered the order after Gen. Ripper shot himself. Gen. Ripper feared he'd be captured and tortured in order to get the recall code out of him, when the base was overrun by US Airborne troops.
It later comes to light that the Soviet Union had developed a "Dooms-Day Machine" that is set to go off and destroy the entire earth with the force of 50 hydrogen bombs. All that's needed to set it off is for just one nuclear device to be dropped on the Soviet Union! Which the only surviving B52, that hasn't been shot down or recalled, commanded by Major Kong, Slim Pickens, is just about to do!
Tense and nail-biting final with everything being done to stop Maj. Kong's B52 bomber from succeeding in it's mission. With Maj. Kong and his crew doing everything to make it succeed. The ending will have you on the brink of a nervous breakdown like it does to everyone on the screen with the possible exception of crippled and mentally unstable Dr. Strangelove, Peter Sellers again for the third time. Dr. Strangelove a former Nazi scientist and now the Pentagon's director of weapons research is really looking forward to this once in a lifetime event. He's so excited by it that he actually gets up from his wheelchair and like he says, in a total state of euphoric hysteria, "Main FUHRER! I Can VoK!".
With all the great performances in the movie it was George C. Scott's General "Buck" Turgidson who really stole the show as the pragmatic and at the same time paranoid military man. Gen. Turgidson was always looking ahead first to obliterate the Soviet Union an now that the cats out of the bag, with no chance of stopping the runaway B52's from their mission, try to have the USA control all the worlds mind shafts; in order to survive the impending nuclear holocaust.