The ultimate Cold War satire

Rating: 10/10 (23 July 2001)

"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy, to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."
So says General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) in DR. STRANGELOVE, director Stanley Kubrick's ultimate Cold War satire. The film centers on Hayden's deranged general ordering a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia for those very reasons. Peter Sellers pulls off the impossible by playing three roles: President Merkin Muffley; RAF Colonel Lionel Mandrake (Hayden's executive officer); and the half-mad Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove. George C. Scott, in one of his two greatest roles (the other being PATTON), is hilarious as an equally committed (in more ways than one) anti-Commie general who speculates that a reduced retaliation strike against Russia would result in "no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops!" Factor in the soon-to-be-revealed existence on Russian soil of a Doomsday machine, however, and things become somewhat different.
All of these things come together in one chillingly hilarious package. So many great scenes and dialogue abound in DR. STRANGELOVE that this movie remains memorable. The exact political conditions that helped spawn the film no longer exist in the world now, but a new set of circumstances (the dangerous ideological divide between fanatical right-wing Christians in American government, and fanatical Islamists in the Middle East) still make this movie timely even today.
What I don't think really gets mentioned all that much in relation to DR. STRANGELOVE is that Kubrick is working on three different tracts. First, of course, there's Hayden's anti-Commie paranoia about the fluoridation of water (a belief actually cherished in reality by the far right in 1950s America). Second, there's the chilling irony that those who are in the best position to prevent a nuclear war are also the ones most willing to start one too. Third is the theme of technology (in this case, the Doomsday machine) that Mankind is either unable or unwilling to control. This last theme would be the subject of many superb sci-fi and suspense films in the ensuing decades, including WESTWORLD, COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT, JURASSIC PARK, THE CHINA SYNDROME, A.I., and most especially Kubrick's next film, the magisterial 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.
The end result is perhaps the most corrosive political satire of all time, a consistently hilarious and cutting-edge film about the most frightening subject of our age, and its continued popularity with film buffs and political pundits alike is to be appreciated for all time.