Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, which has won wide and continued acceptance from the time of its release, has come to be considered one of the screen's great masterpieces of black comedy. Yet Kubrick had originally planned the film as a serious adaptation of Peter George's Red Alert, a novel concerned with the demented General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) and his decision to order a group of B-52 bombers to launch an attack inside Russia. Gradually Kubrick's attitude toward his material changed: "My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question."

Kubrick remembers that he kept revising the script right through the production period. "During shooting many substantial changes were made in the script, sometimes together with the cast during improvisations. Some of the best dialogue was created by Peter Sellers himself." Sellers played not only the title role of the eccentric scientist, but also the president of the United States and Captain Mandrake, a British officer who fails to dissuade General Ripper from his set purpose.

Black ironies abound throughout the picture. During an emergency conference called by President Muffley, a disagreement between General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) and the Russian ambassador (Peter Bull) threatens to turn into a brawl, and the president intervenes by reminding them, "Please, gentlemen, you can't fight here; this is the War Room!" Later, when Mandrake tries to reach the president in order to warn him about the imminent attack on Russia, he finds that he lacks the correct change for the pay telephone he is using, and that the White House will not accept a collect call. He then demands that Colonel Bat Guano (Keenan Wynn) fire into a Coca-Cola machine in order to obtain the necessary coins. Guano reluctantly agrees, ruefully reminding Mandrake that it is he who will have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company. Guano blasts the machine, bends down to scoop up the silver – and is squirted full in the face with Coca-Cola by the vindictive machine.

Kubrick had originally included a scene in which the Russians and the Americans in the War Room engage in a free-for-all with custard pies, but deleted it from the final print of the film when he decided that "it was too farcical, and not consistent with the satiric tone of the rest of the film." Very much in keeping with the satiric, dark humor of the picture is the figure of Dr. Strangelove himself, Kubrick's grim vision of man's final capitulation to the machine: he is more a robot than a human being, with his mechanical arm spontaneously saluting Hitler, his former employer, and his mechanical hand, gloved in black, at one point trying to strangle the flesh and blood still left in him.

In the end a single U.S. plane reaches its Russian target, setting off the Russian's retaliatory Doomsday machine. There follows a series of blinding explosions, while on the sound track we hear a popular song which Kubrick resurrected from World War II: "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when." (Kubrick used the original World War II recording by Vera Lynn, which brought popularity back not only to the song but to Ms. Lynn as well.)

One critic summed up the film by saying that the black comedy which Kubrick had originally thought to exclude from Dr. Strangelove provides some of its most meaningful moments. "They are made up of the incongruities, the banalities, and misunderstandings that we are constantly aware of in our lives. On the brink of annihilation, they become irresistibly absurd."

The theme that emerges from Dr. Strangelove is the plight of fallible man putting himself at the mercy of his "infallible" machines and thus bringing about his own destruction. Kubrick, who is always on the side of humanity in his films, indicates here, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey, that human fallibility is less likely to destroy man than the relinquishing of his moral responsibilities to his supposedly faultless machinery. Summing up his personal vision as it is reflected in Dr. Strangelove, the director has said: "The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale. Our extinction would be little more than a match flaring for a second in the heavens. And if that match does blaze in the darkness, there will be none to mourn a race that used a power that could have lit a beacon in the stars to light its funeral pyre."

Release Date: 1964
Rating: PG

Starring: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, Peter Bull, Tracy Reed, James Earl Jones, Jack Creley, Frank Berry, Glenn Beck, Shane Rimmer, Paul Tamarin, Gordon Tanner, Robert O'Neil, Roy Stephens, Laurence Herder, John McCarthy, and Hal Galili
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, and Peter George

Source Citation: Phillips, Gene D. "Dr. Strangelove; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. 4th ed. Vol. 1: Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 333-335.

**********

Check out the complete list of
MovieRetriever's 100 Greatest Movies here!

**********

Sign up for a My MovieRetriever account today,
post a comment, and let us know what YOU think.

**********