The darkest dark comedy of them all.

Rating: 10/10 (11 November 2014)

What is a dark comedy? I would describe it as a movie that deals with a dark subject and looks at it in such a humorous way. The Coen Brothers are known for this for their works like Raising Arizona, and Fargo. But my favorite dark comedy is this one. Stanley Kubrick takes the darkest idea imaginable and turns it into something hilarious. A paranoid USAF officer named General Jack D Ripper (Sterling Hayden) launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union just for fun. Meanwhile in the war room President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) frantically tries to stop Ripper's attack. Also in the war room are the inane USAF chief of staff General Buck Turgidson and the former Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove (also played by Sellers). Merkin is just trying to keep this whole thing under control but the first telephone conversations with the Russian Premier show that he really has no urgency yet. Turgidson is incredibly hyper and energy filled. Instead of viewing Ripper's attack as a horrible mistake and trying to fix it, he actually offers Merkin strategy on how to strike again. He was actually based on real life Air Force General Curtis Lemay and if you read as much Air Force history as I do, you'll know that Lemay was known for doing things like this. Dr. Strangelove actually get's very little screen time but when he's on screen he absolutely steals the show. This is one of the very few times where Kubrick left one of his actors to improvise because he pretty much knew what Sellers could do. All the actors do a fantastic job so if you like dark comedies (and by that I mean really dark) you have got to see this movie. It is amazing.